Bersani, L. (2010) - Is The Rectum A Grave and Other Essays. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press. 222 PP

Is the Rectum a Grave?
and Other Essays

leo bersani

and Other Essays
the university of chicago press • chicago and london

l e o b e r s a n i is professor emeritus of French at the University of
California, Berkeley. He is the author of Homos and coauthor, with
Adam Phillips, of Intimacies, the latter also published by the University
of Chicago Press.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2010 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2010
Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04352-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04354-8 (paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-04352-5 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-04354-1 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicaion Data

Bersani, Leo.
Is the rectum a grave? : and other essays / Leo Bersani.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04352-4 (alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04354-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-04352-5 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-04354-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sex (Psychology) 2. Psycho-
analysis and art. 3. Gender identity. 4. Queer theory. 5. Cruising (Sexual
behavior) 6. Psychoanalysis. 7. Aesthetics. I. Title.
BF175.5.S48B47 2010
155.3—dc22
2009021307
o The paper used in this publication meets the

minimum requirements of the American National Standard
for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
For Kaja Silverman
Contents
Preface ix
Part 1 | The Sexual Subject

1 Is the Rectum a Grave? 3
2 Is There a Gay Art? 31
3 Gay Betrayals 36
4 Sociability and Cruising 45
5 Aggression, Gay Shame, and Almodóvar’s Art 63
Part 2 | Toward an Aesthetic Subject

6 Against Monogamy 85
7 Sociality and Sexuality 102
8 Can Sex Make Us Happy? 120
9 Fr-oucault and the End of Sex 133
10 Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject 139
11 The Will to Know 154
Part 3 | Two Interviews

12 A Conversation with Leo Bersani
with Tim Dean, Hal Foster, and Kaja Silverman 171
13 Beyond Redemption: An Interview with Leo Bersani
with Nicholas Royle 187
Index 203
Preface
The thematic coherence of this book lies in the connections I have been try-
ing to establish, over the past twenty years or so, among three major topics:
sexuality, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics. In part 1, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”
and the other essays address issues that have been discussed with consider-
able originality (and a sense of urgency) since the advent of the AIDS epi-
demic and the birth of queer theory. Chief among these issues are questions
concerning gender, identity, and sexuality. Perhaps my principal contribu-
tion to these discussions has been my ambivalent response to positions that,
in my view, have been too rapidly and uncritically accepted in readings of
some brilliant yet also problematic texts of queer theory. In particular, the
frequently incisive questioning of dominant assumptions about sexual iden-
tity were, especially in the early years of queer theory, accompanied by what
seem to me oversimplified (or, as I have called them, pastoral) versions of
a nonidentitarian sexuality and subjectivity. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” and,
among my books, Homos (1995) most specifically embody these responses on
my part, although chapters 4 and 5 of part 1 complicate and, I hope, refine
my own views.
The refinements and complications were in large part of the result of my
conviction that questions regarding subjectivity (and, in particular, sexual
identity) could not be adequately discussed without an appeal to psycho-
analysis. My treatment of how this might be done is, once again, ambivalent,
this time in regard to my commitment to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis
had been central to my early work, mostly in connection with literary texts
(especially in Baudelaire and Freud [1977] and The Freudian Body [1986]);
more recently, it has seemed to me important to address the suspicion, even
rejection, of psychoanalytic theory in certain queer and feminist thinkers.
Undeniably, psychoanalysis has played a role in the modern project, ana-
lyzed by Foucault, of normativizing the human subject. As perhaps the most
important modern reflection on subjectivity, psychoanalysis can hardly fail to
play a significant role in promoting or obstructing our attempts to re-imagine
the subject and to invent what Foucault called “new relational modes.” I take
p r e fa c e | x
Foucault’s summoning us to rethink the relational as a political and moral

imperative (a precondition of durable social transformations), and in my
writing I have attempted to define how psychoanalytic notions might both
invigorate and impede this project. (The mobility of my thought between
psychoanalysis and a non- or antipsychoanalytic current best exemplified
in Foucault is most succinctly illustrated in chapter 9, “Fr-oucault and the
End of Sex.”)
Questions of identity are inseparable from questions about how we relate
to both the human and the nonhuman world. Subjectivity is inherently re-
lational. What we are is largely a function of how we connect to the world.
The tracing of these connections—perceptual, psychic, communal—is in-
escapably the tracing of formal mobilities, of the “shape” of how we position
ourselves both physically and psychically in the world. Art therefore becomes
a crucial model or guide (not, however, in a narrowly formalistic sense) in
the invention of “new relational modes.” My most recent work (especially
chapter 10 and the Godard section of chapter 11) are attempts to rethink the
aesthetic, not as a category restricted to works more or less officially desig-
nated as “works of art,” but as enabling and exemplifying the ethical posi-
tions and commitments which, it seems to me, this entire collection seeks
to articulate.
PART
1
The Sexual Subject
1
To the memory of Robert Hagopian
These people have sex twenty to thirty times a night. . . . A man

comes along and goes from anus to anus and in a single night will
act as a mosquito transferring infected cells on his penis. When
this is practised for a year, with a man having three thousand
sexual intercourses, one can readily understand this massive
epidemic that is currently upon us.
professor opendra narayan, the johns hopkins medical school
I will leave you wondering, with me, why it is that when a

woman spreads her legs for a camera, she is assumed to
be exercising free will.
catharine a. mackinnon
Le moi est haïssable. . . .

pascal
There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it. I don’t have any
statistics to back this up, and I doubt (although since Kinsey there has been
no shortage of polls on sexual behavior) that any poll has ever been taken in
which those polled were simply asked, “Do you like sex?” Nor am I suggesting
the need for any such poll, since people would probably answer the question
as if they were being asked, “Do you often feel the need to have sex?” and one
of my aims will be to suggest why these are two wholly different questions.
Originally published in October 43 (Winter 1987): 197–222.

i s t h e r e c t u m a g r av e ? | 4
I am, however, interested in my rather irresponsibly announced findings of

our nonexistent poll because they strike me as helping to make intelligible
a broader spectrum of views about sex and sexuality than perhaps any other
single hypothesis. In saying that most people don’t like sex, I’m not arguing
(nor, obviously, am I denying) that the most rigidly moralistic dicta about sex
hide smoldering volcanoes of repressed sexual desire. When you make this
argument, you divide people into two camps, and at the same time you let
it be known to which camp you belong. There are, you intimate, those who
can’t face their sexual desires (or, correlatively, the relation between those
desires and their views of sex), and those who know that such a relation exists
and who are presumably unafraid of their own sexual impulses. Rather, I’m
interested in something else, something both camps have in common, which
may be a certain aversion, an aversion that is not the same thing as a repres-
sion and that can coexist quite comfortably with, say, the most enthusiastic
endorsement of polysexuality with multiple sex partners.
The aversion I refer to comes in both benign and malignant forms. Malig-
nant aversion has recently had an extraordinary opportunity both to express
(and to expose) itself, and, tragically, to demonstrate its power. I’m thinking
of course of responses to AIDS—more specifically, of how a public health
crisis has been treated like an unprecedented sexual threat. The signs and
sense of this extraordinary displacement are the subject of an excellent book
just published by Simon Watney, aptly entitled Policing Desire.1 Watney’s
premise is that “AIDS is not only a medical crisis on an unparalleled scale,
it involves a crisis of representation itself, a crisis over the entire framing of
knowledge about the human body and its capacities for sexual pleasure”
(p. 9). Policing Desire is both a casebook of generally appalling examples of
this crisis (taken largely from government policy concerning AIDS, as well
as from press and television coverage, in England and America) and, most
interestingly, an attempt to account for the mechanisms by which a spectacle
of suffering and death has unleashed and even appeared to legitimize the
impulse to murder.
There is, first of all, the by now familiar, more or less transparent, and
ever-increasing evidence of the displacement that Watney studies. At the
highest levels of officialdom, there have been the criminal delays in fund-
ing research and treatment, the obsession with testing instead of curing, the
singularly unqualified members of Reagan’s (belatedly constituted) AIDS
1. Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media, Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press, 1987. The present essay began as a review of this book; page references for all quota-
tions from it are given in parentheses.
commission,2 and the general tendency to think of AIDS as an epidemic of

the future rather than a catastrophe of the present. Furthermore, “hospital
policies,” according to a New York City doctor quoted by Watney, “have
more to do with other patients’ fears than a concern for the health of AIDS
patients” (p. 38). Doctors have refused to operate on people known to be
infected with the HIV virus, schools have forbidden children with AIDS to
attend classes, and recently citizens of the idyllically named town of Arcadia,
Florida, set fire to the house of a family with three hemophiliac children
apparently infected with HIV. Television and the press continue to confuse
AIDS with the HIV virus, to speak of AIDS as if it were a venereal disease,
and consequently to suggest that one catches it by being promiscuous. The
effectiveness of the media as an educating force in the fight against AIDS can
be measured by the results of a poll cited by Watney in which 56.8 percent
of News of the World readers came out “in favour of the idea that ‘AIDS
carriers’ should be ‘sterilised and given treatment to curb their sexual ap-
petite,’ with a mere fifty-one percent in favour of the total recriminalisation
of homosexuality” (p. 141). Anecdotally, there is, at a presumably high level
of professional expertise, the description of gay male sex—which I quote as
an epigraph to this essay—offered to viewers of a BBC Horizon program by
one Opendra Narayan of the Johns Hopkins Medical School (background
in veterinary medicine). A less colorfully expressed but equally lurid account
of gay sex was given by Justice Richard Wallach of New York State Supreme
Court in Manhattan when, in issuing the temporary restraining order that
closed the New St. Marks Baths, he noted: “What a bathhouse like this sets
up is the orgiastic behavior of multiple partners, one after the other, where in
five minutes you can have five contacts.”3 Finally, the story that gave me the
greatest morbid delight appeared in the London Sun under the headline “I’d
Shoot My Son if He Had AIDS, Says Vicar!” accompanied by a photograph
of a man holding a shotgun at a boy at pointblank range. The son, appar-
ently more attuned to his father’s penchant for violence than the respectable
2. Comparing the authority and efficiency of Reagan’s AIDS commission to the presidential com-
mission on the Space Shuttle accident, Philip M. Boffey wrote: “The staff and resources available
to the AIDS commission are far smaller than that provided the Challenger commission. The Chal-
lenger panel had a staff of 49, including 15 investigators and several other professionals, operating on
a budget of about $3 million, exclusive of staff salaries. Moreover, the Challenger commission could
virtually order NASA to perform tests and analyses at its bidding, thus vastly multiplying the resources
at its disposal. In contrast, the AIDS commission currently has only six employees, although it may
well appoint 10 to 15 in all, according to Dr. Mayberry, the former chairman. Its budget is projected at
$950,000, exclusive of staff salaries. Although the AIDS commission has been promised cooperation
by all Federal agencies, it is in no position to compel them to do its work” (New York Times, October
16, 1987, p. 10).
3. “Court Orders Bath House in Village to Stay Shut,” New York Times, December 28, 1985, p. 11.
reverend himself, candidly added, “Sometimes I think he would like to shoot

me whether I had AIDS or not” (quoted pp. 94–95).
All of this is, as I say, familiar ground, and I mention these few disparate
items more or less at random simply as a reminder of where our analytical
inquiry starts, and to suggest that, given the nature of that starting point, anal-
ysis, while necessary, may also be an indefensible luxury. I share Watney’s
interpretive interests, but it is also important to say that, morally, the only
necessary response to all of this is rage. “AIDS,” Watney writes, “is effectively
being used as a pretext throughout the West to ‘justify’ calls for increasing
legislation and regulation of those who are considered to be socially unac-
ceptable” (p. 3). And the unacceptable ones in the AIDS crisis are, of course,
male homosexuals and IV drug users (many of the latter, are, as we know,
poor blacks and Hispanics). Is it unjust to suggest that News of the World
readers and the gun-toting British vicar are representative examples of the
“general public’s” response to AIDS? Are there more decent heterosexuals
around, heterosexuals who don’t awaken a passionate yearning not to share
the same planet with them? Of course there are, but—and this is particu-
larly true of England and the United States—power is in the hands of those
who give every sign of being able to sympathize more with the murderous
“moral” fury of the good vicar than with the agony of a terminal KS patient.
It was, after all, the Justice Department of the United States that issued a
legal opinion stating that employers could fire employees with AIDS if they
had so much as the suspicion that the virus could be spread to other workers,
regardless of medical evidence. It was the American Secretary of Health and
Human Services who recently urged Congress to defer action on a bill that
would ban discrimination against people infected with HIV, and who also
argued against the need for a federal law guaranteeing the confidentiality of
HIV antibody test results.
To deliver such opinions and arguments is of course not the same thing as
pointing a gun at your son’s head, but since, as it has often been said, the fail-
ure to guarantee confidentiality will discourage people from taking the test
and thereby make it more difficult to control the spread of the virus, the only
conclusion we can draw is that Secretary Otis R. Bowen finds it more im-
portant to have the names of those who test positive than to slow the spread
of AIDS into the sacrosanct “general public.” To put this schematically: hav-
ing the information necessary to lock up homosexuals in quarantine camps
may be a higher priority in the family-oriented Reagan Administration than
saving the heterosexual members of American families from AIDS. Such a
priority suggests a far more serious and ambitious passion for violence than
what are after all the rather banal, rather normal son-killing impulses of the
Reverend Robert Simpson. At the very least, such things as the Justice De-
partment’s near recommendation that people with AIDS be thrown out of
their jobs suggest that if Edwin Meese would not hold a gun to the head of
a man with AIDS, he might not find the murder of a gay man with AIDS
(or without AIDS?) intolerable or unbearable. And this is precisely what can
be said of millions of fine Germans who never participated in the murder of
Jews (and of homosexuals), but who failed to find the idea of the holocaust un-
bearable. That was the more than sufficient measure of their collaboration,
the message they sent to their Führer even before the holocaust began but
when the idea of it was around, was, as it were, being tested for acceptability
during the ‘30s by less violent but nonetheless virulent manifestations of anti-
Semitism, just as our leaders, by relegating the protection of people infected
with HIV to local authorities, are telling those authorities that anything goes,
that the federal government does not find the idea of camps—or perhaps
worse—intolerable.
We can of course count on the more liberal press to editorialize against
Meese’s opinions and Bowen’s urgings. We can, however, also count on
that same press to give front-page coverage to the story of a presumably
straight health worker testing positive for the HIV virus and—at least until
recently—almost no coverage at all to complaints about the elephantine
pace at which various drugs are being tested and approved for use against
the virus. Try keeping up with AIDS research through TV and the press, and
you’ll remain fairly ignorant. You will, however, learn a great deal from the
tube and from your daily newspaper about heterosexual anxieties. Instead of
giving us sharp investigative reporting—on, say, 60 Minutes—on research
inefficiently divided among various uncoordinated and frequently competing
private and public centers and agencies, or on the interests of pharmaceutical
companies in helping to make available (or helping to keep unavailable) new
antiviral treatments and in furthering or delaying the development of a vac-
cine,4 TV treats us to nauseating processions of yuppie women announcing
4. On November 15, 1987—a month after I wrote this—60 Minutes did, in fact, devote a twenty-
minute segment to AIDS. The report centered on Randy Shilts’s recently published tale of responses
and nonresponses—both in the government and in the gay community—to the AIDS crisis (And
the Band Played On, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1987). The report presented a sympathetic view of
Shilts’s chronicle of the delayed and half-hearted efforts to deal with the epidemic, and also informed
viewers that not a single official of the Reagan Administration would agree—or was authorized—to
talk on 60 Minutes on the politics of AIDS. However, nearly half of the segment—the first half—
was devoted to the murderously naughty sexual habits of Gaetan Dugas, or “Patient Zero,” the
French-Canadian airline steward who, Shilts claims, was responsible for 40 of the first 200 cases of
AIDS reported in the US. Thus the report was sensationalized from the very start with the most
to the world that they will no longer put out for their yuppie boyfriends unless
these boyfriends agree to use a condom. Thus hundreds of thousands of gay
men and IV drug users, who have reason to think that they may be infected
with HIV, or who know that they are (and who therefore live in daily terror
that one of the familiar symptoms will show up), or who are already suffering
from an AIDS-related illness, or who are dying from one of these illnesses,
are asked to sympathize with all those yuppettes agonizing over whether
they’re going to risk losing a good fuck by taking the “unfeminine” initiative
of interrupting the invading male in order to insist that he practice safe sex. In
the face of all that, the shrillness of a Larry Kramer can seem like the simplest
good sense. The danger of not exaggerating the hostility to homosexuality
“legitimized” by AIDS is that, being “sensible,” we may soon find ourselves
in situations where exaggeration will be difficult, if not impossible. Kramer
has recently said that “if AIDS does not spread out widely into the white non-
drug-using heterosexual population, as it may or may not do, then the white
non-drug-using population is going to hate us even more—for scaring them,
for costing them a fucking fortune, for our ‘lifestyle,’ which they say caused
this.”5 What a morbid, even horrendous, yet perhaps sensible suggestion:
only when the “general public” is threatened can whatever the opposite of a
general public is hope to get adequate attention and treatment.
Almost all the media coverage of AIDS has been aimed at the heterosexual
groups now minimally at risk, as if the high-risk groups were not part of the
audience. And in a sense, as Watney suggests, they’re not. The media targets
“an imaginary national family unit which is both white and heterosexual”
(p. 43). This doesn’t mean that most TV viewers in Europe and America are
not white and heterosexual and part of a family. It does, however, mean, as
Stuart Hall argues, that representation is very different from reflection: “It
implies the active work of selecting and presenting, of structuring and shap-
ing: not merely the transmitting of already-existing meaning, but the more
active labour of making things mean” (quoted p. 124). TV doesn’t make the
repugnant image of homosexuality imaginable: that of the irresponsible male tart who willfully spread
the virus after he was diagnosed and warned of the dangers to others of his promiscuity. I won’t go
into—as of course 60 Minutes (which provides the best political reporting on American network televi-
sion) didn’t go into—the phenomenon of Shilts himself as an overnight media star, and the relation
between his stardom and his irreproachably respectable image, his longstanding willingness, indeed
eagerness, to join the straights in being morally repelled by gay promiscuity. A good deal of his much
admired “objectivity” as a reporter consists in his being as venomous toward those at an exceptionally
high risk of becoming afflicted with AIDS (gay men) as toward the government officials who seem
content to let them die.
5. Quoted from a speech at a rally in Boston preceding a gay pride celebration; reprinted in, among
other publications, the San Francisco lesbian and gay newspaper Coming Up!, vol. 8, no. 11 (August
1987), p. 8.
family, but it makes the family mean in a certain way. That is, it makes an
exceptionally sharp distinction between the family as a biological unit and as
a cultural identity, and it does this by teaching us the attributes and attitudes
by which people who thought they were already in a family actually only
begin to qualify as belonging to a family. The great power of the media, and
especially of television, is, as Watney writes, “its capacity to manufacture sub-
jectivity itself” (p. 125), and in so doing to dictate the shape of an identity. The
“general public” is at once an ideological construct and a moral prescription.
Furthermore, the definition of the family as an identity is, inherently, an ex-
clusionary process, and the cultural product has no obligation whatsoever to
coincide exactly with its natural referent. Thus the family identity produced
on American television is much more likely to include your dog than your
homosexual brother or sister.
T he peculiar exclusion of the principal sufferers in the AIDS crisis from

the discourse about it has perhaps been felt most acutely by those gay
men who, until recently, were able to feel that they could both be relatively
open about their sexuality and still be thought of as belonging to the “general
public,” to the mainstream of American life. Until the late ’60s and ’70s, it
was of course difficult to manage both these things at the same time. There is,
I believe, something salutary in our having to discover the illusory nature of
that harmonious adjustment. We now know, or should know, that “gay men,”
as Watney writes, “are officially regarded, in our entirety, as a disposable con-
stituency” (p. 137). “In our entirety” is crucial. While it would of course be
obscene to claim that the comfortable life of a successful gay white business-
man or doctor is as oppressed as that of a poverty-stricken black mother in
one of our ghettoes, it is also true that the power of blacks as a group in the
United States is much greater than that of homosexuals. Paradoxically, as we
have recently seen in the vote of conservative Democratic senators from the
South against the Bork nomination to the Supreme Court, blacks, by their
sheer number and their increasing participation in the vote, are no longer
a disposable constituency in those very states that have the most illustrious
record of racial discrimination. This obviously doesn’t mean that blacks have
made it in white America. In fact, some political attention to black interests
has a certain tactical utility: it softens the blow and obscures the perception
of a persistent indifference to the always flourishing economic oppression
of blacks. Nowhere is that oppression more visible, less disguised, than in
such great American cities as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago,
although it is typical of the American genius for politically displaced thought
that when white liberal New Yorkers (and white liberal columnists such as
Anthony Lewis) think of racial oppression, they probably always have images
of South Africa in mind.6 Yet, some blacks are needed in positions of promi-
nence or power, which is not at all true for gay people. Straights can very
easily portray gays on TV, while whites generally can’t get away with passing
for black and are much less effective than blacks as models in TV ads for fast-
food chains targeted at the millions of blacks who don’t have the money to
eat anywhere else. The more greasy the product, the more likely some black
models will be allowed to make money promoting it. Also, the country obvi-
ously needs a Civil Rights Commission, and it just as obviously has to have
blacks on that commission, while there is clearly no immediate prospect for
a federal commission to protect and promote gay ways of life. There is no
longer a rationale for the oppression of blacks in America, while AIDS has
made the oppression of gay men seem like a moral imperative.
In short, a few blacks will always be saved from the appalling fate of
most blacks in America, whereas there is no political need to save or protect
any homosexuals at all. The country’s discovery that Rock Hudson was gay
changed nothing: nobody needs actors’ votes (or even actors, for that matter)
in the same way Southern senators need black votes to stay in power. In those
very cities where white gay men could, at least for a few years, think of them-
selves as decidedly more white than black when it came to the distribution of
privileges in America, cities where the increasingly effective ghettoization of
blacks progresses unopposed, the gay men who have had as little trouble as
their straight counterparts in accepting this demographic and economic seg-
regation must now accept the fact that, unlike the underprivileged blacks all
around them whom, like most other whites, they have developed a technique
for not seeing, they—the gays—have no claims to power at all. Frequently
on the side of power, but powerless; frequently affluent, but politically desti-
tute; frequently articulate, but with nothing but a moral argument—not even
recognized as a moral argument—to keep themselves in the protected white
enclaves and out of the quarantine camps.
On the whole, gay men are no less socially ambitious, and, more often than
we like to think, no less reactionary and racist than heterosexuals. To want sex
with another man is not exactly a credential for political radicalism—a fact
both recognized and denied by the gay liberation movement of the late ’60s
6. The black brothers and sisters on behalf of whom Berkeley students demonstrate in Sproul Plaza
are always from Johannesburg, never from East Oakland, although signs posted on Oakland telephone
poles and walls, which these same students have probably never seen, now announce—dare we have
the optimism to say “ominously”?—“Oakland is South Africa.”
and early ’70s. Recognized to the extent that gay liberation, as Jeffrey Weeks
has put it, proposed “a radical separation . . . between homosexuality, which
was about sexual preference, and ‘gayness,’ which was about a subversively
political way of life.”7 And denied in that this very separation was proposed by
homosexuals, who were thereby at least implicitly arguing for homosexuality
itself as a privileged locus or point of departure for a political-sexual identity
not “fixed” by, or in some way traceable to, a specific sexual orientation.8 It
is no secret that many homosexuals resisted, or were simply indifferent to,
participation in “a subversively political way of life,” to being, as it were, de-
homosexualized in order to join what Watney describes as “a social identity
defined not by notions of sexual ‘essence,’ but in oppositional relation to
the institutions and discourses of medicine, the law, education, housing and
welfare policy, and so on” (p. 18). More precisely—and more to the point of
an assumption that radical sex means or leads to radical politics—many gay
men could, in the late ’60s and early ’70’s, begin to feel comfortable about
having “unusual” or radical ideas about what’s OK in sex without modifying
one bit their proud middle-class consciousness or even their racism. Men
whose behavior at night at the San Francisco Cauldron or the New York
Mineshaft could win five-star approval from the (mostly straight) theoreti-
cians of polysexuality had no problem being gay slumlords during the day
and, in San Francisco for example, evicting from the Western Addition black
families unable to pay the rents necessary to gentrify that neighborhood.
I don’t mean that they should have had a problem about such combina-
tions in their lives (although I obviously don’t mean that they should have felt
comfortable about being slumlords), but I do mean that there has been a lot
of confusion about the real or potential political implications of homosexual-
ity. Gay activists have tended to deduce those implications from the status
of homosexuals as an oppressed minority rather than from what I think are
(except perhaps in societies more physically repressive than ours has been)
the more crucially operative continuities between political sympathies on
the one hand and, on the other, fantasies connected with sexual pleasure.
7. Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities, London,
Boston, and Henley, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, p. 198.
8. Weeks has a good summary of that “neat ruse of history” by which the “intent of the early gay
liberation movement . . . to disrupt fixed expectations that homosexuality was a peculiar condition or
minority experience” was transformed, by less radical elements in the movement, into a fight for the
legitimate claims of a newly recognized minority, “of what was now an almost ‘ethnic’ identity.” Thus
“the breakdown of roles, identities, and fixed expectations” was replaced by “the acceptance of ho-
mosexuality as a minority experience,” an acceptance that “deliberately emphasizes the ghettoization
of homosexual experience and by implication fails to interrogate the inevitability of heterosexuality”
(ibid., pp. 198–199).
Thanks to a system of gliding emphases, gay activist rhetoric has even man-
aged at times to suggest that a lust for other men’s bodies is a by-product or
a decision consequent upon political radicalism rather than a given point of
departure for a whole range of political sympathies. While it is indisputably
true that sexuality is always being politicized, the ways in which having sex
politicizes are highly problematical. Right-wing politics can, for example,
emerge quite easily from a sentimentalizing of the armed forces or of blue-
collar workers, a sentimentalizing which can itself prolong and sublimate a
marked sexual preference for sailors and telephone linemen.
In short, to put the matter polemically and even rather brutally, we have
been telling a few lies—lies whose strategic value I fully understand, but
which the AIDS crisis has rendered obsolescent. I do not, for example, find
it helpful to suggest, as Dennis Altman has suggested, that gay baths created
“a sort of Whitmanesque democracy, a desire to know and trust other men in
a type of brotherhood far removed from the male bondage of rank, hierarchy,
and competition that characterise much of the outside world.”9 Anyone who
has ever spent one night in a gay bathhouse knows that it is (or was) one of the
most ruthlessly ranked, hierarchized, and competitive environments imag-
inable. Your looks, muscles, hair distribution, size of cock, and shape of ass
determined exactly how happy you were going to be during those few hours,
and rejection, generally accompanied by two or three words at most, could
be swift and brutal, with none of the civilizing hypocrisies with which we get
rid of undesirables in the outside world. It has frequently been suggested in
recent years that such things as the gay-macho style, the butch-fem lesbian
couple, and gay and lesbian sadomasochism, far from expressing unqualified
and uncontrollable complicities with a brutal and misogynous ideal of mas-
culinity, or with the heterosexual couple permanently locked into a power
structure of male sexual and social mastery over female sexual and social
passivity, or, finally, with fascism, are in fact subversive parodies of the very
formations and behaviors they appear to ape. Such claims, which have been
the subject of lively and often intelligent debate, are, it seems to me, totally
aberrant, even though, in terms probably unacceptable to their defenders,
they can also—indeed, must also—be supported.
First of all, a distinction has to be made between the possible effects of
these styles on the heterosexual world that provides the models on which
they are based, and their significance for the lesbians and gay men who per-
form them. A sloganesque approach won’t help us here. Even Weeks, whose
9. Dennis Altman, The Homosexualization of America, The Americanization of the Homosexual,
New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1982, pp. 79–80.
work I admire, speaks of “the rise of the macho-style amongst gay men in
the 1970s . . . as another episode in the ongoing ‘semiotic guerilla warfare’
waged by sexual outsiders against the dominant order,” and he approvingly
quotes Richard Dyer’s suggestion that “by taking the signs of masculinity
and eroticizing them in a blatantly homosexual context, much mischief is
done to the security with which ‘men’ are defined in society, and by which
their power is secured.”10 These remarks deny what I take to be wholly non-
subversive intentions by conflating them with problematically subversive
effects. It is difficult to know how “much mischief” can be done by a style
that straight men see—if indeed they see it at all—from a car window as
they drive down Folsom Street. Their security as males with power may very
well not be threatened at all by that scarcely traumatic sight, because noth-
ing forces them to see any relation between the gay-macho style and their
image of their own masculinity (indeed, the very exaggerations of that style
make such denials seem plausible). It may, however, be true that to the ex-
tent that the heterosexual male more or less secretly admires or identifies
with motorcycle masculinity, its adoption by faggots creates, as Weeks and
Dyer suggest, a painful (if passing) crisis of representation. The gay-macho
style simultaneously invents the oxymoronic expression “leather queen” and
denies its oxymoronic status; for the macho straight man, leather queen is
intelligible, indeed tolerable, only as an oxymoron—which is of course to
say that it must remain unintelligible. Leather and muscles are defiled by a
sexually feminized body, although—and this is where I have trouble with
Week’s contention that the gay-macho style “gnaws at the roots of a male
heterosexual identity”11—the macho male’s rejection of his representation
by the leather queen can also be accompanied by the secret satisfaction of
knowing that the leather queen, for all his despicable blasphemy, at least
intends to pay worshipful tribute to the style and behavior he defiles. The
very real potential for subversive confusion in the joining of female sexuality
(I’ll return to this in a moment) and the signifiers of machismo is dissipated
once the heterosexual recognizes in the gay-macho style a yearning toward
machismo, a yearning that, very conveniently for the heterosexual, makes of
the leather queen’s forbidding armor and warlike manners a perversion rather
than a subversion of real maleness.
Indeed, if we now turn to the significance of the macho-style for gay men,
it would, I think, be accurate to say that this style gives rise to two reactions,
both of which indicate a profound respect for machismo itself. One is the
10. Weeks, p. 191.
11. Ibid.
classic put-down: the butch number swaggering into a bar in a leather get-
up opens his mouth and sounds like a pansy, takes you home, where the
first thing you notice is the complete works of Jane Austen, gets you into
bed, and—well, you know the rest. In short, the mockery of gay machismo
is almost exclusively an internal affair, and it is based on the dark suspicion
that you may not be getting the real article. The other reaction is, quite
simply, sexual excitement. And this brings us back to the question not of the
reflection or expression of politics in sex, but rather of the extremely obscure
process by which sexual pleasure generates politics.
If licking someone’s leather boots turns you (and him) on, neither of you
is making a statement subversive of macho masculinity. Parody is an erotic
turn-off, and all gay men know this. Much campy talk is parodistic, and while
that may be fun at a dinner party, if you’re out to make someone you turn off
the camp. Male gay camp is, however, largely a parody of women, which,
obviously, raises some other questions. The gay male parody of a certain
femininity, which, as others have argued, may itself be an elaborate social
construct, is both a way of giving vent to the hostility toward women that
probably afflicts every male (and which male heterosexuals have of course
expressed in infinitely nastier and more effective ways) and could also par-
odoxically be thought of as helping to deconstruct that image for women
themselves. A certain type of homosexual camp speaks the truth of that
femininity as mindless, asexual, and hysterically bitchy, thereby provoking,
it would seem to me, a violently antimimetic reaction in any female specta-
tor. The gay male bitch desublimates and desexualizes a type of femininity
glamorized by movie stars, whom he thus lovingly assassinates with his style,
even though the campy parodist may himself be quite stimulated by the hate-
ful impulses inevitably included in his performance. The gay-macho style,
on the other hand, is intended to excite others sexually, and the only reason
that it continues to be adopted is that it frequently succeeds in doing so. (If,
especially in its more extreme leather forms, it is so often taken up by older
men, it is precisely because they count on it to supplement their diminished
sexual appeal.)
The dead seriousness of the gay commitment to machismo (by which I
of course don’t mean that all gays share, or share unambivalently, this com-
mitment) means that gay men run the risk of idealizing and feeling inferior
to certain representations of masculinity on the basis of which they are in
fact judged and condemned. The logic of homosexual desire includes the
potential for a loving identification with the gay man’s enemies. And that is a
fantasy-luxury that is at once inevitable and no longer permissible. Inevitable
because a sexual desire for men can’t be merely a kind of culturally neutral
attraction to a Platonic Idea of the male body; the object of that desire neces-
sarily includes a socially determined and socially pervasive definition of what
it means to be a man. Arguments for the social construction of gender are by
now familiar. But such arguments almost invariably have, for good political
reasons, quite a different slant; they are didactically intended as demonstrations
that the male and female identities proposed by a patriarchal and sexist cul-
ture are not to be taken for what they are proposed to be: ahistorical, essential,
biologically determined identities. Without disagreeing with this argument, I
want to make a different point, a point understandably less popular with those
impatient to be freed of oppressive and degrading self-definitions. What I’m
saying is that a gay man doesn’t run the risk of loving his oppressor only in the
ways in which blacks or Jews might more or less secretly collaborate with their
oppressors—that is, as a consequence of the oppression, of that subtle corrup-
tion by which a slave can come to idolize power, to agree that he should be
enslaved because he is enslaved, that he should be denied power because he
doesn’t have any. But blacks and Jews don’t become blacks and Jews as a result
of that internalization of an oppressive mentality, whereas that internalization
is in part constitutive of male homosexual desire, which, like all sexual de-
sire, combines and confuses impulses to appropriate and to identify with the
object of desire. An authentic gay male political identity therefore implies a
struggle not only against definitions of maleness and of homosexuality as they
are reiterated and imposed in a heterosexist social discourse, but also against
those very same definitions so seductively and so faithfully reflected by those
(in large part culturally invented and elaborated) male bodies that we carry
within us as permanently renewable sources of excitement.
T here is, however, perhaps a way to explode this ideological body. I want
to propose, instead of a denial of what I take to be important (if politi-
cally unpleasant) truths about male homosexual desire, an arduous represen-
tational discipline. The sexist power that defines maleness in most human
cultures can easily survive social revolutions; what it perhaps cannot survive
is a certain way of assuming, or taking on, that power. If, as Weeks puts it, gay
men “gnaw at the roots of a male heterosexual identity,” it is not because of
the parodistic distance that they take from that identity, but rather because,
from within their nearly mad identification with it, they never cease to feel the
appeal of its being violated.
To understand this, it is perhaps necessary to accept the pain of embrac-
ing, at least provisionally, a homophobic representation of homosexuality.
Let’s return for a moment to the disturbed harmonies of Arcadia, Florida,

and try to imagine what its citizens—especially those who set fire to the Rays’
home—actually saw when they thought about or looked at the Rays’ three
boys. The persecuting of children or of heterosexuals with AIDS (or who
have tested positive for HIV) is particularly striking in view of the popular
description of such people as “innocent victims.” It is as if gay men’s “guilt”
were the real agent of infection. And what is it, exactly, that they are guilty of?
Everyone agrees that the crime is sexual, and Watney, along with others, de-
fines it as the imagined or real promiscuity for which gay men are so famous.
He analyzes a story about AIDS by the science correspondent of the Observer
in which the “major argument, supported by ‘AIDS experts in America,’ [is]
against ‘casual sexual encounters.’” A London doctor does, in the course
of the article, urge the use of condoms in such encounters, but “the main
problem . . . is evidently ‘promiscuity,’ with issues about the kinds of sex one
has pushed firmly into the background” (p. 35). But the kinds of sex involved,
in quite a different sense, may in fact be crucial to the argument. Since the
promiscuity here is homosexual promiscuity, we may, I think, legitimately
wonder if what is being done is not as important as how many times it is be-
ing done. Or, more exactly, the act being represented may itself be associated
with insatiable desire, with unstoppable sex.
Before being more explicit about this, I should acknowledge that the
argument I wish to make is a highly speculative one, based primarily on
the exclusion of the evidence that supports it. An important lesson to be
learned from a study of the representation of AIDS is that the messages most
likely to reach their destination are messages already there. Or, to put this in
other terms, representations of AIDS have to be X-rayed for their fantasmatic
logic; they document the comparative irrelevance of information in com-
munication. Thus the expert medical opinions about how the virus cannot be
transmitted (information that the college-educated mayor of Arcadia and his
college-educated wife have heard and refer to) is at once rationally discussed
and occulted. SueEllen Smith, the Arcadia mayor’s wife, makes the unob-
jectionable comment that “there are too many unanswered questions about
this disease,” only to conclude that “if you are intelligent and listen and read
about AIDS you get scared when it involves your own children, because you
realize all the assurances are not based on solid evidence.” In strictly rational
terms, this can of course be easily answered: there are indeed “many unan-
swered questions” about AIDS, but the assurances given by medical authori-
ties that there is no risk of the HIV virus being transmitted through casual
contact among schoolchildren is in fact based on “solid evidence.” But what
interests me most about the New York Times interview with the Smiths from
which I am quoting (they are a genial, even disarming couple: “I know I must
sound like a country jerk saying this,” remarks Mr. Smith, who really never
does sound like a country bumpkin) is the evidence that they have in fact re-
ceived and thoroughly assimilated quite different messages about AIDS. The
mayor said that “a lot of local people, including himself, believed that power-
ful interests, principally the national gay leaders, had pressured the Govern-
ment into refraining from taking legitimate steps to help contain the spread
of AIDS.”12 Let’s ignore the charming illusion that “national gay leaders” are
powerful enough to pressure the federal government into doing anything at
all, and focus on the really extraordinary assumption that those belonging to
the group hit most heavily by AIDS want nothing more intensely than to see
it spread unchecked. In other words, those being killed are killers. Watney
cites other versions of this idea of gay men as killers (their behavior is seen
as the cause and source of AIDS), and he speaks of “a displaced desire to kill
them all—the teeming deviant millions” (p. 82). Perhaps; but the presumed
original desire to kill gays may itself be understandable only in terms of the
fantasy for which it is offered as an explanation: homosexuals are killers. But
what is it, exactly, that makes them killers?
The public discourse about homosexuals since the AIDS crisis began has a
startling resemblance (which Watney notes in passing) to the representation
of female prostitutes in the nineteenth century “as contaminated vessels, con-
veyancing ‘female’ venereal diseases to ‘innocent’ men” (pp. 33–34).13 Some
more light is retroactively thrown on those representations by the association
of gay men’s murderousness with what might be called the specific sexual
heroics of their promiscuity. The accounts of Professor Narayan and Judge
Wallach of gay men having sex twenty to thirty times a night, or once a min-
ute, are much less descriptive of even the most promiscuous male sexuality
than they are reminiscent of male fantasies about women’s multiple orgasms.
The Victorian representation of prostitutes may explicitly criminalize what
is merely a consequence of a more profound or original guilt. Promiscuity is
the social correlative of a sexuality physiologically grounded in the menacing
phenomenon of the nonclimactic climax. Prostitutes publicize (indeed, sell)
the inherent aptitude of women for uninterrupted sex. Conversely, the simi-
larities between representations of female prostitutes and male homosexuals
12. Jon Nordheimer, “To Neighbors of Shunned Family AIDS Fear Outweighs Sympathy,” New
York Times, August 31, 1987, p. A1.
13. Charles Bernheimer’s excellent study of the representation of prostitution in nineteenth-century
France will be published by Harvard University Press in 1988.
should help us to specify the exact form of sexual behavior being targeted,
in representations of AIDS, as the criminal, fatal, and irresistibly repeated
act. This is of course anal sex (with the potential for multiple orgasms having
spread from the insertee to the insertor, who, in any case, may always switch
roles and be the insertee for ten or fifteen of those thirty nightly encounters),
and we must of course take into account the widespread confusion in hetero-
sexual and homosexual men between fantasies of anal and vaginal sex. The
realities of syphilis in the nineteenth century and of AIDS today “legitimate”
a fantasy of female sexuality as intrinsically diseased; and promiscuity in this
fantasy, far from merely increasing the risk of infection, is the sign of infec-
tion. Women and gay men spread their legs with an unquenchable appetite
for destruction.14 This is an image with extraordinary power; and if the good
citizens of Arcadia, Florida, could chase from their midst an average, law-
abiding family, it is, I would suggest, because in looking at three hemophiliac
children they may have seen—that is, unconsciously represented—the infi-
nitely more seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the
air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.
But why “suicidal”? Recent studies have emphasized that even in societies
in which, as John Boswell writes, “standards of beauty are often predicated
on male archetypes” (he cites ancient Greece and the Muslim world) and,
even more strikingly, in cultures that do not regard sexual relations between
men as unnatural or sinful, the line is drawn at “passive” anal sex. In me-
dieval Islam, for all its emphasis on homosexual eroticism, “the position of
the ‘insertee’ is regarded as bizarre or even pathological,” and while for the
ancient Romans, “the distinction between roles approved for male citizens
and others appears to center on the giving of seed (as opposed to the receiv-
ing of it) rather than on the more familiar modern active-passive division,” to
be anally penetrated was no less judged to be an “indecorous role for citizen
males.”15 And in Volume II of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault
has amply documented the acceptance (even glorification) and profound
suspicion of homosexuality in ancient Greece. A general ethical polarity in
Greek thought of self-domination and a helpless indulgence of appetites has,
as one of its results, a structuring of sexual behavior in terms of activity and
passivity, with a correlative rejection of the so-called passive role in sex. What
14. The fact that the rectum and the vagina, as far as the sexual transmission of the HIV virus is
concerned, are privileged loci of infection is of course a major factor in this legitimizing process, but
it hardly explains the fantasmatic force of the representations I have been discussing.
15. John Boswell, “Revolutions, Universals and Sexual Categories,” Salmagundi, nos. 58–59 (Fall
1982–Winter 1983), pp. 107, 102, and 110. See also Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homo-
sexuality, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980.
the Athenians find hard to accept, Foucault writes, is the authority of a leader
who as an adolescent was an “object of pleasure” for other men; there is a
legal and moral incompatibility between sexual passivity and civic authority.
The only “honorable” sexual behavior “consists in being active, in dominat-
ing, in penetrating, and in thereby exercising one’s authority.”16
In other words, the moral taboo on “passive” anal sex in ancient Athens
is primarily formulated as a kind of hygienics of social power. To be pen-
etrated is to abdicate power. I find it interesting that an almost identical
argument—from, to be sure, a wholly different moral perspective—is being
made today by certain feminists. In an interview published a few years ago
in Salmagundi, Foucault said, “Men think that women can only experience
pleasure in recognizing men as masters”17—a sentence one could easily take
as coming from the pens of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.
These are unlikely bedfellows. In the same interview from which I have just
quoted, Foucault more or less openly praises sado-masochistic practices for
helping homosexual men (many of whom share heterosexual men’s fear of
losing their authority by “being under another man in the act of love”) to
“alleviate” the “problem” of feeling “that the passive role is in some way
demeaning.”18 MacKinnon and Dworkin, on the other hand, are of course
not interested in making women feel comfortable about lying under men,
but in changing the distribution of power both signified and constituted by
men’s insistence on being on top. They have had quite a bit of bad press,
but I think that they make some very important points, points that—rather
unexpectedly—can help us to understand the homophobic rage unleashed
by AIDS. MacKinnon, for example, argues convincingly against the liberal
distinction between violence and sex in rape and pornography, a distinction
that, in addition to denying what should be the obvious fact that violence is
sex for the rapist, has helped to make pornography sound merely sexy, and
therefore to protect it. If she and Dworkin use the word violence to describe
pornography that would normally be classified as nonviolent (for example,
porno films with no explicit sado-masochism or scenes of rape), it is because
they define as violent the power relation that they see inscribed in the sex acts
pornography represents. Pornography, MacKinnon writes, “eroticizes hier-
archy”; it “makes inequality into sex, which makes it enjoyable, and into gen-
der, which makes it seem natural.” Not too differently from Foucault (except,
16. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley, New York, Pantheon, 1985. This
argument is made in chapter 4.
17. “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” Salmagundi, nos. 58–59
(Fall 1982–Winter 1983), p. 21.
18. Ibid.
of course, for the rhetorical escalation), MacKinnon speaks of “the male su-
premacist definition of female sexuality as lust for self-annihilation.” Pornog-
raphy “institutionalizes the sexuality of male supremacy, fusing the eroticiza-
tion of dominance and submission with the social construction of male and
female.”19 It has been argued that even if such descriptions of pornography
are accurate, they exaggerate its importance: MacKinnon and Dworkin see
pornography as playing a major role in constructing a social reality of which
it is really only a marginal reflection. In a sense—and especially if we con-
sider the size of the steady audience for hard-core pornography—this is true.
But the objection is also something of a cop-out, because if it is agreed that
pornography eroticizes—and thereby celebrates—the violence of inequal-
ity itself (and the inequality doesn’t have to be enforced with whips to be
violent: the denial to blacks of equal seating privileges on public busses was
rightly seen as a form of racial violence), then legal pornography is legalized
violence.
Not only that: MacKinnon and Dworkin are really making a claim for the
realism of pornography. That is, whether or not we think of it as constitutive
(rather than merely reflective) of an eroticizing of the violence of inequality,
pornography would be the most accurate description and the most effec-
tive promotion of that inequality. Pornography can’t be dismissed as less sig-
nificant socially than other more pervasive expressions of gender inequality
(such as the abominable and innumerable TV ads in which, as part of a sales
pitch for cough medicine and bran cereals, women are portrayed as slaves to
the normal functioning of their men’s bronchial tubes and large intestines),
because only pornography tells us why the bran ad is effective: the slavish-
ness of women is erotically thrilling. The ultimate logic of MacKinnon’s
and Dworkin’s critique of pornography—and, however parodistic this may
sound, I really don’t mean it as a parody of their views—would be the crimi-
nalization of sex itself until it has been reinvented. For their most radical claim
is not that pornography has a pernicious effect on otherwise nonpernicious
sexual relations, but rather that so-called normal sexuality is already porno-
graphic. “When violence against women is eroticized as it is in this culture,”
MacKinnon writes, “it is very difficult to say that there is a major distinction
in the level of sex involved between being assaulted by a penis and being
assaulted by a fist, especially when the perpetrator is a man.”20 Dworkin has
taken this position to its logical extreme: the rejection of intercourse itself.
19. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and London, England, Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 3 and 172.
20. Ibid., p. 92.
If, as she argues, “there is a relationship between intercourse per se and the
low-status of women,” and if intercourse itself “is immune to reform,” then
there must be no more penetration. Dworkin announces: “In a world of
male power—penile power—fucking is the essential sexual experience of
power and potency and possession; fucking by mortal men, regular guys.”21
Almost everybody reading such sentences will find them crazy, although in
a sense they merely develop the implicit moral logic of Foucault’s more de-
tached and therefore more respectable formulation: “Men think that women
can only experience pleasure in recognizing men as masters.” MacKinnon,
Dworkin, and Foucault are all saying that a man lying on top of a woman
assumes that what excites her is the idea of her body being invaded by a
phallic master.
The argument against pornography remains, we could say, a liberal argu-
ment as long as it is assumed that pornography violates the natural conjunc-
tion of sex with tenderness and love. It becomes a much more disturbingly
radical argument when the indictment against pornography is identified with
an indictment against sex itself. This step is usually avoided by the positing
of pornography’s violence as either a sign of certain fantasies only margin-
ally connected with an otherwise essentially healthy (caring, loving) form of
human behavior, or the symptomatic by-product of social inequalities (more
specifically, of the violence intrinsic to a phallocentric culture). In the first
case, pornography can be defended as a therapeutic or at least cathartic outlet
for those perhaps inescapable but happily marginal fantasies, and in the sec-
ond case pornography becomes more or less irrelevant to a political struggle
against more pervasive social structures of inequality (for once the latter are
dismantled, their pornographic derivatives will have lost their raison d’être).
MacKinnon and Dworkin, on the other hand, rightly assume the immense
power of sexual images to orient our imagination of how political power
can and should be distributed and enjoyed, and, it seems to me, they just as
rightly mistrust a certain intellectual sloppiness in the catharsis argument, a
sloppiness that consists in avoiding the question of how a center of presum-
ably wholesome sexuality ever produced those unsavory margins in the first
place. Given the public discourse around the center of sexuality (a discourse
obviously not unmotivated by a prescriptive ideology about sex), the margins
may be the only place where the center becomes visible.
Furthermore, although their strategies and practical recommendations
are unique, MacKinnon’s and Dworkin’s work could be inscribed within
21. Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, New York, The Free Press, 1987, pp. 124, 137, 79.
a more general enterprise, one which I will call the redemptive reinvention
of sex. This enterprise cuts across the usual lines on the battlefield of sexual
politics, and it includes not only the panicky denial of childhood sexuality,
which is being “dignified” these days as a nearly psychotic anxiety about
child abuse, but also the activities of such prominent lesbian proponents of
S & M sex as Gayle Rubin and Pat Califia, neither of whom, to put it mildly,
share the political agenda of MacKinnon and Dworkin. The immense body
of contemporary discourse that argues for a radically revised imagination of
the body’s capacity for pleasure—a discursive project to which Foucault,
Weeks, and Watney belong—has as its very condition of possibility a certain
refusal of sex as we know it, and a frequently hidden agreement about sexual-
ity as being, in its essence, less disturbing, less socially abrasive, less violent,
more respectful of “personhood” than it has been in a male-dominated, phal-
locentric culture. The mystifications in gay activist discourse on gay male
machismo belong to this enterprise; I will return to other signs of the gay
participation in the redemptive sex project. For the moment, I want to argue,
first of all, that MacKinnon and Dworkin have at least had the courage to be
explicit about the profound moral revulsion with sex that inspires the entire
project, whether its specific program be antipornography laws, a return to the
arcadian mobilities of childhood polysexuality, the S & M battering of the
body in order to multiply or redistribute its loci of pleasure, or, as we shall
see, the comparatively anodine agenda (sponsored by Weeks and Watney)
of sexual pluralism. Most of these programs have the slightly questionable
virtue of being indubitably saner than Dworkin’s lyrical tribute to the mili-
tant pastoralism of Joan of Arc’s virginity, but the pastoral impulse lies be-
hind them all. What bothers me about MacKinnon and Dworkin is not their
analysis of sexuality, but rather the pastoralizing, redemptive intentions that
support the analysis. That is—and this is the second, major point I wish to
argue—they have given us the reasons why pornography must be multiplied
and not abandoned, and, more profoundly, the reasons for defending, for
cherishing the very sex they find so hateful. Their indictment of sex—their
refusal to prettify it, to romanticize it, to maintain that fucking has anything
to do with community or love—has had the immensely desirable effect of
publicizing, of lucidly laying out for us, the inestimable value of sex as—at
least in certain of its ineradicable aspects—anticommunal, antiegalitarian,
antinurturing, antiloving.
Let’s begin with some anatomical considerations. Human bodies are con-
structed in such a way that it is, or at least has been, almost impossible not to
associate mastery and subordination with the experience of our most intense
pleasures. This is first of all a question of positioning. If the penetration neces-

sary (until recently . . . ) for the reproduction of the species has most generally
been accomplished by the man’s getting on top of the woman, it is also true
that being on top can never be just a question of a physical position—either
for the person on top or for the one on the bottom. (And for the woman
to get on top is just a way of letting her play the game of power for awhile,
although—as the images of porn movies illustrate quite effectively—even
on the bottom, the man can still concentrate his deceptively renounced ag-
gressiveness in the thrusting movement of his penis.)22 And, as this suggests,
there is also, alas, the question of the penis. Unfortunately, the dismissal of
penis envy as a male fantasy rather than a psychological truth about women
doesn’t really do anything to change the assumptions behind that fantasy.
For the idea of penis envy describes how men feel about having one, and,
as long as there are sexual relations between men and women, this can’t
help but be an important fact for women. In short, the social structures from
which it is often said that the eroticizing of mastery and subordination derive
are perhaps themselves derivations (and sublimations) of the indissociable
nature of sexual pleasure and the exercise or loss of power. To say this is not to
propose an “essentialist” view of sexuality. A reflection on the fantasmatic po-
tential of the human body—the fantasies engendered by its sexual anatomy
and the specific moves it makes in taking sexual pleasure—is not the same
thing as an a priori, ideologically motivated, and prescriptive description
of the essence of sexuality. Rather, I am saying that those effects of power
which, as Foucault has argued, are inherent in the relational itself (they are
immediately produced by “the divisions, inequalities and disequilibriums”
inescapably present “in every relation from one point to another”)23 can per-
haps most easily be exacerbated, and polarized into relations of mastery and
subordination, in sex, and that this potential may be grounded in the shifting
experience that every human being has of his or her body’s capacity, or fail-
ure, to control and to manipulate the world beyond the self.
Needless to say, the ideological exploitations of this fantasmatic potential
have a long and inglorious history. It is mainly a history of male power, and
by now it has been richly documented by others. I want to approach this
subject from a quite different angle, and to argue that a gravely dysfunctional
22. The idea of intercourse without thrusting was proposed by Shere Hite in The Hite Report,
New York, Macmillan, 1976. Hite envisaged “a mutual lying together in pleasure, penis-in-vagina,
vagina-covering-penis, with female orgasm providing much of the stimulation necessary for male
orgasm” (p. 141).
23. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, New
York, Vintage Books, 1980, pp. 93–94.
aspect of what is, after all, the healthy pleasure we take in the operation of a
coordinated and strong physical organism is the temptation to deny the per-
haps equally strong appeal of powerlessness, of the loss of control. Phallocen-
trism is exactly that: not primarily the denial of power to women (although
it has obviously also led to that, everywhere and at all times), but above all
the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women. I don’t
mean the value of gentleness, or nonaggressiveness, or even of passivity, but
rather of a more radical disintegration and humiliation of the self. For there
is finally, beyond the fantasies of bodily power and subordination that I have
just discussed, a transgressing of that very polarity which, as Georges Bataille
has proposed, may be the profound sense of both certain mystical experi-
ences and of human sexuality. In making this suggestion I’m also thinking
of Freud’s somewhat reluctant speculation, especially in the Three Essays
on the Theory of Sexuality, that sexual pleasure occurs whenever a certain
threshold of intensity is reached, when the organization of the self is mo-
mentarily disturbed by sensations or affective processes somehow “beyond”
those connected with psychic organization. Reluctant because, as I have ar-
gued elsewhere, this definition removes the sexual from the intersubjective,
thereby depriving the teleological argument of the Three Essays of much of
its weight. For on the one hand Freud outlines a normative sexual develop-
ment that finds its natural goal in the post-Oedipal, genitally centered desire
for someone of the opposite sex, while on the other hand he suggests not only
the irrelevance of the object in sexuality but also, and even more radically, a
shattering of the psychic structures themselves that are the precondition for
the very establishment of a relation to others. In that curiously insistent, if
intermittent, attempt to get at the “essence” of sexual pleasure—an attempt
that punctuates and interrupts the more secure narrative outline of the history
of desire in the Three Essays—Freud keeps returning to a line of speculation
in which the opposition between pleasure and pain becomes irrelevant, in
which the sexual emerges as the jouissance of exploded limits, as the ecstatic
suffering into which the human organism momentarily plunges when it is
“pressed” beyond a certain threshold of endurance. Sexuality, at least in the
mode in which it is constituted, may be a tautology for masochism. In The
Freudian Body, I proposed that this sexually constitutive masochism could
even be thought of as an evolutionary conquest in the sense that it allows the
infant to survive, indeed to find pleasure in, the painful and characteristically
human period during which infants are shattered with stimuli for which they
have not yet developed defensive or integrative ego structures. Masochism
would be the psychical strategy that partially defeats a biologically dysfunc-
tional process of maturation.24 From this Freudian perspective, we might

say that Bataille reformulates this self-shattering into the sexual as a kind of
nonanecdotal self-debasement, as a masochism to which the melancholy of
the post-Oedipal superego’s moral masochism is wholly alien, and in which,
so to speak, the self is exuberantly discarded.25
The relevance of these speculations to the present discussion should be
clear: the self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexual-
ity is associated with power. It is possible to think of the sexual as, precisely,
moving between a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of all consciousness of
self. But sex as self-hyperbole is perhaps a repression of sex as self-abolition. It
inaccurately replicates self-shattering as self-swelling, as psychic tumescence.
If, as these words suggest, men are especially apt to “choose” this version of
sexual pleasure, because their sexual equipment appears to invite by analogy,
or at least to facilitate, the phallicizing of the ego, neither sex has exclusive
rights to the practice of sex as self-hyperbole. For it is perhaps primarily the
degeneration of the sexual into a relationship that condemns sexuality to be-
coming a struggle for power. As soon as persons are posited, the war begins. It
is the self that swells with excitement at the idea of being on top, the self that
makes of the inevitable play of thrusts and relinquishments in sex an argu-
ment for the natural authority of one sex over the other.
F ar from apologizing for their promiscuity as a failure to maintain a loving

relationship, far from welcoming the return to monogamy as a beneficent
consequence of the horror of AIDS,26 gay men should ceaselessly lament the
practical necessity, now, of such relationships, should resist being drawn into
mimicking the unrelenting warfare between men and women, which noth-
ing has ever changed. Even among the most critical historians of sexuality
and the most angry activists, there has been a good deal of defensiveness
about what it means to be gay. Thus for Jeffrey Weeks the most distinctive
aspect of gay life is its “radical pluralism.”27 Gayle Rubin echoes and extends
24. See Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, New York, Columbia University
Press, 1986, chapter II, especially pp. 38–39.
25. Bataille called this experience “communication,” in the sense that it breaks down the barriers
that define individual organisms and keep them separate from one another. At the same time, however,
like Freud he seems to be describing an experience in which the very terms of a communication are
abolished. The term thus lends itself to a dangerous confusion if we allow it to keep any of its ordinary
connotations.
26. It might be pointed out that, unless you met your lover many, many years ago and neither you
nor he has had sex with anyone else since then, monogamy is not that safe anyway. Unsafe sex a few
times a week with someone carrying the HIV virus is undoubtedly like having unsafe sex with several
HIV positive strangers over the same period of time.
27. Weeks, p. 218.
this idea by arguing for a “theoretical as well as a sexual pluralism.”28 Watney

repeats this theme with, it is true, some important nuances. He sees that
the “new gay identity was constructed through multiple encounters, shifts
of sexual identification, actings out, cultural reinforcements, and a plurality
of opportunity (at least in large urban areas) for desublimating the inherited
sexual guilt of a grotesquely homophobic society,” and therefore laments the
“wholesale de-sexualisation of gay culture and experience” encouraged by
the AIDS crisis (p. 18). He nonetheless dilutes what I take to be the specific
menace of gay sex for that “grotesquely homophobic society” by insisting on
the assertion of “the diversity of human sexuality in all its variant forms” as
“perhaps the most radical aspect of gay culture” (p. 25). Diversity is the key
word in his discussions of homosexuality, which he defines as “a fluctuating
field of sexual desires and behaviour” (p. 103); it maximizes “the mutual
erotic possibilities of the body, and that is why it is taboo” (p. 127).29
Much of this derives of course from the rhetoric of sexual liberation in
the ’60s and ’70s, a rhetoric that received its most prestigious intellectual jus-
tification from Foucault’s call—especially in the first volume of his History
of Sexuality—for a reinventing of the body as a surface of multiple sources
of pleasure. Such calls, for all their redemptive appeal, are, however, un-
necessarily and even dangerously tame. The argument for diversity has the
strategic advantage of making gays seem like passionate defenders of one of
the primary values of mainstream liberal culture, but to make that argument
is, it seems to me, to be disingenuous about the relation between homosexual
behavior and the revulsion it inspires. The revulsion, it turns out, is all a
big mistake: what we’re really up to is pluralism and diversity, and getting
buggered is just one moment in the practice of those laudable humanistic
virtues. Foucault could be especially perverse about all this: challenging,
provoking, and yet, in spite of his radical intentions, somewhat appeasing
in his emphases. Thus in the Salmagundi interview to which I have already
referred, after announcing that he will not “make use of a position of author-
ity while [he is] being interviewed to traffic in opinions,” he delivers himself
28. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Car-
ole Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, Boston, London, Melbourne, and
Henley, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, p. 309.
29. A frequently referred to study of gay men and women by the Institute for Sex Research founded
by Alfred C. Kinsey concluded that “homosexual adults are a remarkably diverse group.” See Alan P.
Bell and Martin S. Weinberg, Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity among Men and Women, New
York, Simon and Schuster, 1978, p. 217. One can hardly be unhappy with that conclusion in an “of-
ficial” sociological study, but, needless to say, it tells us very little—and the tables about gay sexual
preferences in the same study aren’t much help here either—concerning fantasies of and about
homosexuals.
of the highly idiosyncratic opinions, first of all, that “for a homosexual, the
best moment of love is likely to be when the lover leaves in the taxi” (“the
homosexual imagination is for the most part concerned with reminiscing
about the act rather than anticipating [or, presumably, enjoying] it”) and,
secondly, that the rituals of gay S & M are “the counterpart of the medieval
courts where strict rules of proprietary courtship were defined.”30 The first
opinion is somewhat embarrassing; the second has a certain campy appeal.
Both turn our attention away from the body—from the acts in which it en-
gages, from the pain it inflicts and begs for—and directs our attention to the
romances of memory and the idealizations of the presexual, the courting
imagination. That turning away from sex is then projected onto heterosexuals
as an explanation for their hostility. “I think that what most bothers those who
are not gay about gayness is the gay life-style, not sex acts themselves,” and,
“It is the prospect that gays will create as yet unforseen kinds of relationships
that many people cannot tolerate.”31 But what is “the gay life-style”? Is there
one? Was Foucault’s life-style the same as Rock Hudson’s? More importantly,
can a nonrepresentable form of relationship really be more threatening than
the representation of a particular sexual act—especially when the sexual act
is associated with women but performed by men and, as I have suggested, has
the terrifying appeal of a loss of the ego, of a self-debasement?
We have been studying examples of what might be called a frenzied epic
of displacements in the discourse on sexuality and on AIDS. The govern-
ment talks more about testing than it does about research and treatment; it is
more interested in those who may eventually be threatened by AIDS than in
those already stricken with it. There are hospitals in which concern for the
safety of those patients who have not been exposed to HIV takes precedence
over caring for those suffering from an AIDS-related disease. Attention is
turned away from the kinds of sex people practice to a moralistic discourse
about promiscuity. The impulse to kill gays comes out as a rage against gay
killers deliberately spreading a deadly virus among the “general public.” The
temptation of incest has become a national obsession with child abuse by
day-care workers and teachers. Among intellectuals, the penis has been sani-
tized and sublimated into the phallus as the originary signifier; the body is to
be read as a language. (Such distancing techniques, for which intellectuals
have a natural aptitude, are of course not only sexual: the national disgrace of
economic discrimination against blacks is buried in the self-righteous call for
sanctions against Pretoria.) The wild excitement of fascistic S & M becomes
30. “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,” pp. 11, 20.
31. Ibid., p. 22.
a parody of fascism; gay males’ idolatry of the cock is “raised” to the political
dignity of “semiotic guerrilla warfare.” The phallocentrism of gay cruising be-
comes diversity and pluralism; representation is displaced from the concrete
practice of fellatio and sodomy to the melancholy charms of erotic memories
and the cerebral tensions of courtship. There has even been the displace-
ment of displacement itself. While it is undeniably right to speak—as, among
others, Foucault, Weeks, and MacKinnon have spoken—of the ideologically
organizing force of sexuality, it is quite another thing to suggest—as these
writers also suggest—that sexual inequalities are predominantly, perhaps ex-
clusively, displaced social inequalities. Weeks, for example, speaks of erotic
tensions as a displacement of politically enforced positions of power and
subordination,32 as if the sexual—involving as it does the source and locus
of every individual’s original experience of power (and of powerlessness) in
the world: the human body—could somehow be conceived of apart from all
relations of power, were, so to speak, belatedly contaminated by power from
elsewhere.
Displacement is endemic to sexuality. I have written, especially in Baude-
laire and Freud, about the mobility of desire, arguing that sexual desire initi-
ates, indeed can be recognized by, an agitated fantasmatic activity in which
original (but, from the start, unlocatable) objects of desire get lost in the
images they generate. Desire, by its very nature, turns us away from its ob-
jects. If I refer critically to what I take to be a certain refusal to speak frankly
about gay sex, it is not because I believe either that gay sex is reducible to
one form of sexual activity or that the sexual itself is a stable, easily observ-
able, or easily definable function. Rather, I have been trying to account for
the murderous representations of homosexuals unleashed and “legitimized”
by AIDS, and in so doing I have been struck by what might be called the
aversion-displacements characteristic of both those representations and the
gay responses to them. Watney is acutely aware of the displacements opera-
tive in “cases of extreme verbal or physical violence towards lesbians and
gay men and, by extension, the whole topic of AIDS”; he speaks, for ex-
ample, of “displaced misogyny,” of “a hatred of what is projected as ‘passive’
and therefore female, sanctioned by the subject’s heterosexual drives” (p.
50). But, as I argued earlier, implicit in both the violence toward gay men
(and toward women, both gay and straight) and the rethinking among gays
(and among women) of what being gay (and what being a woman) means
is a certain agreement about what sex should be. The pastoralizing project
32. See Weeks, p. 44.

could be thought of as informing even the most oppressive demonstrations

of power. If, for example, we assume that the oppression of women disguises
a fearful male response to the seductiveness of an image of sexual powerless-
ness, then the most brutal machismo is really part of a domesticating, even
sanitizing project. The ambition of performing sex as only power is a salva-
tional project, one designed to preserve us from a nightmare of ontological
obscenity, from the prospect of a breakdown of the human itself in sexual
intensities, from a kind of selfless communication with “lower” orders of
being. The panic about child abuse is the most transparent case of this com-
pulsion to rewrite sex. Adult sexuality is split in two: at once redeemed by its
retroactive metamorphosis into the purity of an asexual childhood, and yet
preserved in its most sinister forms by being projected onto the image of the
criminal seducer of children. “Purity” is crucial here: behind the brutalities
against gays, against women, and, in the denial of their very nature and au-
tonomy, against children lies the pastoralizing, the idealizing, the redemptive
project I have been speaking of. More exactly, the brutality is identical to the
idealization.
The participation of the powerless themselves in this project is particularly
disheartening. Gays and women must of course fight the violence directed
against them, and I am certainly not arguing for a complicity with misogy-
nist and homophobic fantasies. I am, however, arguing against that form
of complicity that consists in accepting, even finding new ways to defend,
our culture’s lies about sexuality. As if in secret agreement with the values
that support misogynist images of female sexuality, women call for a per-
manent closing of the thighs in the name of chimerically nonviolent ideals
of tenderness and nurturing; gays suddenly rediscover their lost bathhouses
as laboratories of ethical liberalism, places where a culture’s ill-practiced
ideals of community and diversity are authentically put into practice. But
what if we said, for example, not that it is wrong to think of so-called passive
sex as “demeaning,” but rather that the value of sexuality itself is to demean
the seriousness of efforts to redeem it? “AIDS,” Watney writes, “offers a new
sign for the symbolic machinery of repression, making the rectum a grave”
(p. 126). But if the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal (an
ideal shared—differently—by men and women) of proud subjectivity is bur-
ied, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death. Tragically,
AIDS has literalized that potential as the certainty of biological death, and
has therefore reinforced the heterosexual association of anal sex with a self-
annihilation originally and primarily identified with the fantasmatic mystery
of an insatiable, unstoppable female sexuality. It may, finally, be in the gay
man’s rectum that he demolishes his own perhaps otherwise uncontrollable

identification with a murderous judgment against him.
That judgment, as I have been suggesting, is grounded in the sacrosanct
value of selfhood, a value that accounts for human beings’ extraordinary will-
ingness to kill in order to protect the seriousness of their statements. The self
is a practical convenience; promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a
sanction for violence.33 If sexuality is socially dysfunctional in that it brings
people together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and solipsistic
jouissance that drives them apart, it could also be thought of as our primary
hygienic practice of nonviolence. Gay men’s “obsession” with sex, far from
being denied, should be celebrated—not because of its communal virtues,
not because of its subversive potential for parodies of machismo, not because
it offers a model of genuine pluralism to a society that at once celebrates and
punishes pluralism, but rather because it never stops re-presenting the inter-
nalized phallic male as an infinitely loved object of sacrifice. Male homo-
sexuality advertises the risk of the sexual itself as the risk of self-dismissal, of
losing sight of the self, and in so doing it proposes and dangerously represents
jouissance as a mode of ascesis.
33. This sentence could be rephrased, and elaborated, in Freudian terms, as the difference between
the ego’s function of “reality-testing” and the superego’s moral violence (against the ego).
2
Is There a Gay Art?
In speaking of gay film—or, more generally, gay art today—we tend to mean
films or novels with gay topics, most often made or written by gay and lesbian
filmmakers or novelists. That is, for all the anti-identitarian rhetoric of cur-
rent queer theory, what we mean by gay and lesbian art would seem to be
inseparable from notions of gay authorship, gay audiences, and gay subjects.
I want to propose a notion of gay art—more exactly, a homo-esthetic—to
which homosexual desire is essential, but which, precisely and paradoxically
because of this, can dispense with the concept of homosexual identity.
The current interest in gay and lesbian culture coincided with a new, or re-
newed, sense of a gay community, one that was precipitated, or strengthened,
by a specific event or crisis, such as Stonewall or AIDS. This raises interesting
and difficult questions. Is the community mobilized by a specific crisis des-
tined to disappear with the end of the crisis? Or is its historically precise for-
mation the opportunity to define a gay culture perhaps already there but that
might have remained invisible if there hadn’t been a community to make it
more visible? And if there is a culture, there must be, so the deduction might
continue, a sensibility, and if there is a sensibility, how can it help but express
itself in art? And so we have gay and lesbian film festivals and cultural studies.
The latter takes many forms. There is, for example, a gay and lesbian history
of which many of us were not aware until recent studies brought aspects of
that history to our attention. Part of this history brings to light more or less
underground gay communities in Europe and the United States before the
Unpublished lecture given in London, 1996.

i s t h e r e a g ay a r t ? | 32
modern period, communities in which we see rudimentary forms of what

we would call a gay or lesbian culture. I will pass over for the moment the
relation of this field of studies to the claim that the homosexual did not exist
as a person—that there was only same-sex behavior—before he or she was
invented in the mid-nineteenth century, a claim that might be thought of
as erasing a whole area of gay studies. The latter discovers a premodern gay
culture, one aware of itself as having a personality related to its sexual prefer-
ences, although obviously not one conforming to the terminology of modern
sexology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. It is also true—and this accounts for
some of the best work in contemporary gay and lesbian studies—that “gay
writing” has generally been a function of the writing that officially excluded
it. It developed in an oppositional relation to the textual ideologies available
to it. Thus Michael Warner (in The Letters of the Republic) and Chris Lane
(in The Ruling Passion) have shown, respectively, how an imagination of
intimate relations among men is encoded within such official heterosexual
ideologies as the Puritan theological writing in precolonial America, and the
literature celebrating British imperialism at the beginning of this century.
Such studies point to the historical specificity and relativity of anything we
might wish to call gay textuality: it resists the codes that would leave no place
for it by different maneuvres that (to use terms developed by Judith Butler)
subversively or parodistically resignify those terms. In Wilde, for example, a
gay sensibility could be thought of as encoded within a systematic perverse
reversal of dominant intellectual values. His famous maxim “It is only shal-
low people who do not judge by appearances” is a paradigmatic example of
what we would call today queer writing—a designation that would avoid
the essentializing traps set by the notion of gay writing by broadening the
category to a sexually nonspecific resistance to the dominant culture. We
can even have it both ways (specific and general). D. A. Miller, for example,
speaks in Bringing Out Roland Barthes, of gay people having long recognized
Roland Barthes’s gayness in what he calls Barthes’s gravitating toward “faggy
topics—women’s fashions, transvestism, Sade, wrestling, Proust,” as well as
in an aggressively mannered way of writing implicitly defiant of the straight
reader with its unashamed cultivation of just those qualities of style stigma-
tized as homosexual by much straight criticism. At the same time, Miller
praises Barthes for a less secretive, more explicit celebration of the perverse
as a source of pleasure, a celebration that earns Barthes the distinction of
being not only the imperfectly closeted gay man who was always giving him-
self away to us but also the hero of what Michael Warner has called critical
“thinking against the grain of the normal.”
What I take to be the fertile incoherence of gay and lesbian queer studies
does not, then, really help us very much to come up with a definition of gay
art. It’s clear that we don’t need such a definition, and that it might in fact
narrow the reach and impoverish the content of invigoratingly centrifugal
queer studies. And yet, at the risk of being thought an essentialist villain, I
will now attempt to define a gay esthetic.
In the writers I study in Homos, identity is inseparable from specific posi-
tionings of the body in desire. Desire is depsychologized; a gay identity—I
would prefer to say a gay specificity—would, as a result, not necessarily have
to do with such psychic content as the difference between hetero- and ho-
mosexual shapings of Oedipal attachments and conflicts, but rather would
be a direct inference from images of the body. Obviously I speak from the
subject-position of gay male desire, but similar Inquiries could be done from
lesbian perspectives. The male positioning is especially strong in the case of
Genet. I emphasize a certain sexual positioning in his work Funeral Rites, a
scene of two men fucking in which Genet opposes lovemaking face to face
(which, he writes, would have confined them in a private, exclusionary oval)
to one man standing behind the partner he is penetrating, both of them
forming something like the prow of a boat, looking into the darkness as one
“looks into the future.” “Not loving one in the other,” Genet continues, “they
were escaping from themselves over the world, in full view of the world, in a
gesture of victory.” Victory, I would suggest, over the idea of sex as reinforcing
an intimacy à deux, of using that oval to escape from the view of the world
and of the future and to become instead absorbed by the always futile efforts
to penetrate the other’s secrets, that is, the other’s desires. Sociality in Genet
is something like a series of ejaculatory relays of the self through others, and
an explosively narcissistic view of community that is, however, identical to
a generous outpouring of the self. This homo-narcissism breaks down ego
boundaries instead of reinforcing them. The renunciation of the couple’s
oval-like intimacy may be the precondition for a community in which rela-
tionality is a function of sameness rather than of hierarchical or antagonistic
differences, a community in which we might be indifferent to difference, in
which difference, instead of being the valued term, would be the nonthreat-
ening supplement of sameness.
This would involve a kind of opportunistic appropriation on our part of
some of the very categories that have been imposed on us. In particular we
might welcome the somewhat abusive cultural reduction of sameness and
difference to questions of sexual choice (that is, homosexuals pursue the
same, heterosexuals desire and esteem difference). We might welcome the
identification of homosexuality with sameness by insisting on the radical

potential in that identification: the potential for our having a privileged role
in demonstrating how a sort of impersonal narcissism can break down the
defensive formation of the self-congratulatory ego, a breaking down that must
take place if a fundamental restructuring of the social is ever to take place.
This is a privileged role but not one that is unique or even guaranteed.
There is much self-identified gay writing in which the self-congratulatory ego
reigns unchallenged. Conversely, we might wish to be attentive, in the pro-
ductions of straight artists, not to the homoerotic impulse we have become so
adept at ferreting out in their work, but rather to the currents of homo-ness,
to those ego-dissolving self-extensions into the world that Ulysse Dutoit and I
studied in Rothko’s paintings and in Resnais’ films in Arts of Impoverishment.
Art, especially visual art, can manifest what Greil Marcus calls “the mystery
of spectral connections” between phenomena separated by a conventional
and restrictive perceptual syntax. The art I’m thinking of involves a massive
and double negativity: the negation of relationality as we now know it, and an
attack on the cult of difference that supports the dominant mode of relations.
That negativity can be more prominent in canonical authors than in cultur-
ally marginal art. The latter frequently celebrates minority cultures, thus un-
wittingly supporting the differential barriers that the dominant culture is only
too happy to see reinforced. The canonizing process in our culture, on the
other hand, while explicitly seeking to immortalize art that affirms Western
civilization, frequently and secretly makes into that civilization’s required
reading and viewing monuments of negativity that are the obverse, suicidal
side of an exhaustingly defensive and self-congratulatory ego. Negativity in
art attacks the myths of the dominant culture—the pastoral myth, for ex-
ample, of sexuality as inherently loving and nurturing, of sexuality as con-
tinuous with harmonious community. Only by insisting on the bleakness, the
love of power, even the violence perhaps inherent in human relations can
we perhaps begin to redesign those relations in ways that will not require the
use of culture to ennoble them. Or, put in other terms, how do we control
the historical precipitates of a passion for violence without denying our in-
tractable implication in that passion? An important function of art might be
redefined as anticommunitarian, against (to the extent that this is possible)
institutional assimilations of particular works. Beckett is exemplary here, as
are, in gay writing, the novels of Dennis Cooper, where the Western ideal of
intersubjective knowledge is ruthlessly desublimated and literalized into a
cold and brutal ripping open of bodies as a means of knowing the other.
The disruption of differential relations can of course be figured in less
literally violent ways. I think, for example, that Mallarmé knew that the vio-
lence he was doing to the syntax of normal sentences was a relational vio-
lence with implications beyond the aesthetic—a violence to language as the
instrumentality of social understanding. In the visual arts, when, for example,
painters as different as Da Vinci and Caravaggio at times juxtapose two fig-
ures, one of which seems to be growing out of the upper half of the other
rather than to be fully drawn and distinctly separated from the other (figures
that seem to be Siamese twins), we can see a rather uncanny invasion of the
visual field by a relation of sameness or self-multiplication, a sameness that at
once extends a figure and destroys its boundaries, its contained integrity.
In pursuit of this sort of inquiry, we make ourselves vulnerable to the
attacks of those who want to know what their immediate political agenda
should be, what they should fight for tomorrow. It can be difficult to recog-
nize that art intervenes in political life at various distances from particular
political issues. Even more: an attempt to reconfigure the relational field
may be the precondition for durable political and social reorganizations. We
can see how poignant that difficulty is by briefly looking in conclusion at that
Italian Genet-type outlaw, Caravaggio. In Caravaggio’s Secrets, Ulysse Dutoit
and I paid particular attention to the painter’s obsession with looking. There
are the sexy looks of individual male figures provoking the viewer with an
erotic visual tease; there is Caravaggio painting himself as the erotic tease so
that he might perhaps contain and domesticate its sexual message within the
self-protective, self-same oval of model and painter. There is, within several
paintings, the spying on the enigmatic looks of others, as if visual codes could
no longer be relied on in the setting up of relations. And there are, finally,
the works where the looks of several figures are wildly divergent. Even when
there is someone who should be thought of as centering looking, such as
Christ, nearly everyone around that “central” figure seems to know, as Cara-
vaggio did, that no one has the authority to center our gaze, to define its pri-
mary relation. That Caravaggio knew that, and principally painted religious
subjects in which relational primacy could not by definition be questioned,
is immensely moving. Almost nothing else was available to him, and so he
truly was, even more than Genet, an outlaw, outside all the relational laws
given to him. In painting, relationality is of course largely a question of visual
attention. In Caravaggio, as the figures proliferate, frequently looking at some
unidentifiable point beyond the painting, Caravaggio’s aloneness becomes
all the more visible. For his figures, like him, perhaps like us, know that it al-
most has to be started all over again, but for the moment they, he, we simply
don’t know where to look.
3
Gay Betrayals
With an imagination for surveillance that would have at once appalled and
delighted Michel Foucault, some of the far-right groups in America sympa-
thetic to the antigovernment fury apparently behind the 1995 bombing in
Oklahoma City have come up with an amazing suggestion. According to
them, the federal treasury has marked all the bills it issues in ways that make
it possible for FBI agents to drive by anyone’s home, point the appropriately
attuned electronic device toward a front window, and immediately determine
how much money, at that moment, is inside the house. The pecuniary inflec-
tion of this paranoid fantasy is perhaps characteristically American. We enjoy
comparatively low income-tax rates, and yet a promise to lower taxes even
more works like magic in an election campaign. It is therefore not unsurpris-
ing that few scenarios of panoptic surveillance evoke such dread as the daily
monitoring of our cash assets. But the driving force behind this fantasy is not,
or is not principally, economic insecurity. The invasion of financial privacy
is, for the groups in question, only an especially ominous manifestation of an-
other invasion: that of their identity. The federal government is the enemy of
its people’s particularities, whether these be religious, geographical, ethnic,
racial, or class-determined. Put this way, the fantasy may strike many of us as
not entirely mad, although the particular aberration of those fearful for the
integrity of their dollar bills is to assert that sinister governmental monitoring
is principally aimed at the white Christian majority. This could of course be
Revised version of “Trahisons gay,” from a colloquium at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, June 23 and
27, 1997.
g ay b e t r aya l s | 37
thought of as a triumph of the powerful right wing of the Republican Party,

which has managed to convince a significant minority of Caucasian Ameri-
cans that their grievances—often quite justified—are not caused by the Re-
publican crippling of social services that only the federal government can
provide, but are rather the result of federal activism, an activism motivated
by a sinister identity-plot, a conspiracy at once Jewish, black and homosexual,
designed to eradicate white, Christian, straight identity.
Identity-politics is far from dead. Today the notion of community—and
now I’m by no means speaking only of the United State—is supported by,
indeed often seems grounded in a terror, at times paranoid, at other times
realistic enough, at the loss of an identity conferred by belonging to a com-
munity. Identity is communitarian. Politically reactionary Christian funda-
mentalism shares with other more seriously besieged minorities a conviction
that the most precious values of life are definable in communitarian terms.
Not only that: repression by the majority itself is identitarian. It’s always my
difference against your difference. In education, the defense of the Western
artistic canon is just as much a defense of a cultural identity as, for example,
the Chicano or gay studies programs against which, in American universities,
such defenses are mounted. The value attributed to universalism, as we can
see in France, can itself be a defining trait of a particular cultural identity,
and when a society as culturally homogeneous as France is menaced by
the heterogeneous, we see how easily a certain language of universalism be-
comes the defensive weapon against the proximity of a recalcitrant otherness.
A universalist ideology lends itself to the imperialist promotion of a specific
culture. Confrontation is inevitable, and irresolvable, as long as we debate
the relative values of different cultural identities. Perhaps the only way to
negotiate and ultimately end the conflict is through an effort for which few
of us seem as yet prepared: the effort to rid ourselves not exactly of cultures
(an impossible enterprise in any case), but rather of our belief in the inher-
ent value of any cultural identity whatsoever. What if there were no sides to
be taken in conflicts of cultural identity? There should perhaps be only a
potentially explosive insistence that the value attached to such identities is
nothing more than the disposable waste of their history.
These remarks could easily appear to be at odds with my principal argu-
ment in Homos. There I protest against the de-gaying of gayness, and the
protest could be thought of as a way of reaffirming the value of a gay identity.
Indeed, the book grew out of my perplexed sense that the unprecedented
gay visibility of recent years has been accompanied by a willed invisibility
on the part of those presumably most anxious to make themselves visible. A
paradoxical relation to the notion of a gay or homosexual identity—at once

proud and self-erasing—makes the cultural politics of gays and lesbians, or
of queers, a particularly fertile ground in which to raise the issues of identity
evoked a moment ago. In richly troubled fashion, queers have at once em-
powered and invalidated identitarian politics. And by simultaneously pro-
claiming pride in a gay and lesbian community and making that community
essentially unidentifiable, queer thinkers have brought into sharper focus
than ever before the problematic nature of what we nevertheless continue to
take for granted: the very notion and value of community itself. And it is in
doing that that queers should command the attention of straights—that is,
not because we have anything to tell them about the value of relationships or
community (something that might help to rescue them from what we glibly
talk about as the hell of “compulsory” heterosexuality), but rather because
of our exemplary confusion. Our implicit and involuntary message might be
that we aren’t sure of how we want to be social, and that we therefore invite
straights to redefine with us the notions of community and sociality.
These issues were raised, in rather different ways, by Foucault, and to a
large extent the arguments in Homos are an ambivalent response to some of
his work. He has done more than any other modern writer to both enrich
and confuse our thinking about homosexuality and how we might define and
work toward a gay community. Chapter 3 of Homos begins with a discussion
of remarks by Foucault that seductively and dangerously simplify the ques-
tions just raised. In a 1982 interview for the American magazine Salmaqundi,
Foucault said: “I think that what most bothers those who are not gay about
gayness is the gay life-style, not sex acts themselves. . . . It is the prospect that
gays will create as yet unforseen kinds of relationships that many people
cannot tolerate.” There are three assumptions in Foucault’s claims that have
been important in queer theory. First of all, homosexual sex is not what is
threatening about homosexuality. Second, there is nothing to interpret in
homosexual desire and, by implication, no homosexual character shaping
such desire. Third, gays are more dangerous politically without an analyzable
identity. It is the remarkable result of Foucault’s argument that no one wants
to be called a homosexual—an aversion most striking on the part of self-
identified homosexual activists and theorists. Monique Wittig has claimed
that “it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with
women”; for Judith Butler, the only thing lesbians have in common is a
knowledge of how homophobia works against women; and Michael Warner
argues that queerness is characterized by a determined “resistance to regimes
of the normal.” The extreme distrust of all self-identifying moves evidenced
in such remarks is understandable. The elaborating of erotic preferences into

a character—into a kind of erotically determined essence—is, as Foucault
forcefully argues, inherently a disciplinary project. Panoptic vision depends
on a successful immobilizing of the objects it surveys; only then can behavior
be transformed into manipulatable characterological types.
And yet the way in which the Foucauldian suspicion of sexual essences
has been picked up by queer theorists has made me almost nostalgic for
those very essences. The principal critical argument of Homos is that gay
men and lesbians have nearly disappeared into their sophisticated awareness
of how they been culturally constructed as gay men and lesbians (which is
not to deny the importance of cultural construction in the attribution to us
of such things as a gay sensibility). And the consequence of self-erasure is . . .
self-erasure, the elimination of gays—the principal aim of homophobia. An
acceptance, a promotion of a certain homosexual specificity may be neces-
sary in order for us to be as dangerous culturally, and ultimately politically,
as many of us would like to be. Might same-sex desire be transgressive not
simply of sexual customs, but, more radically, of the very notions of relational-
ity in which such customs are grounded? Furthermore, the anti-identitarian
critique needs to be qualified. It is not at all certain that modern typologies,
genealogies, and schemes of desire are necessarily more essentializing than
earlier sexual classifications on the basis of behavior alone (rather than some
fixed inner disposition). The ancient Greek model, as both Foucault and
David Halperin describe it, made for a brutal reduction of the person to his
sexual behavior: phallic penetration of another’s body not only expressed
virility but also was a sign of social superiority, an expression of something we
might call the (male) citizen-essence. This binary model is a striking example
of the misogyny inherent in homophobia, even though it was not opposed
to homosexuality per se. In a sense, the Greeks were so open about their
revulsion to what they understood as female sexuality, and so untroubled in
their thinking about the relation between power and phallic penetration, that
they didn’t need to pretend, as nineteenth-century sexologists did, that men
who went to bed with other men were all secretly women. Only half of them
were women, and that judgment had enormous social implications: the adult
male citizen who allowed himself to be penetrated like women and slaves
was politically disgraced. Even the crudest identity-mongering leaves us freer
than that. To be a woman in a man’s body can certainly be thought of as an
imprisoning definition, but at least it leaves open the possibility of wonder-
ing, as Freud did, about the various desiring positions a woman might take.
While psychoanalysis has played a major role in the essentializing of desire,
it has also initiated an anti-essentializing inquiry into the nature of desire.

There is no reason to be as suspicious of such inquiries as Foucault was, for
they have helped us to see that the mobility of desire defeats the project of
fixing identity by way of a science of desire. That mobility makes impossible
correlations the Greeks found easy to make: most notably between on the
one hand, penetrating or being penetrated by another person and, on the
other, attributions of moral and political superiority and inferiority.
This, however, is not what I was principally interested in demonstrating
in Homos. Important work has been done by others that shows, first, that psy-
choanalytic genealogies of desire may actually destroy rather than reinforce
normative views of sexuality (the teleology according to which heterosexual
genitality is the normal, mature end-point of sexual development) and, sec-
ond, that the specificity of same-sex desire puts into question the very cat-
egory of same-sex desire (because, precisely, of the gender-bending variety
of desiring positions inherent in homosexual fantasy). In the context of the
de-gaying—the gay and lesbian disappearing act—I began by examining,
psychoanalysis proposes a mode of nonessentializing, always provisional psy-
chic visibility. It suggests a specificity of both origin and movement in gay
desire, a specificity quite different from the fixed identity constructed by dis-
ciplinary networks of power. However, given the necessarily uncertain nature
of all etiological investigations of desire, and their tendency to harden into
dogma (even presumably liberating dogma), I’m not interested in commiting
myself to a stable definition of gay desire. Or, more exactly, such a defini-
tion is useful, perhaps even necessary, insofar as we investigate its relational
implications—by which I mean the continuities between desire and com-
munity, between our sexuality and the ways in which we imagine sociality.
The psychoanalytic inquiry can be politicized in ways generally not al-
lowed for by queer theorists. Like Eve Sedgwick, most of these thinkers feel
that accounts of the origin of sexual preference and identity in individuals
run counter to politically gay-affirmative work. The trouble is that gay affir-
mation has become a tame affair, which is perhaps inevitable when we are
that suspicious of sexual identities. Queer rhetoric, as in Butler’s definition
of lesbians as people who know how homophobia operates against women,
can be deliberately inflammatory, but in rejecting the sexual specificity of
queerness we have become more and more inclined to define our commu-
nitarian goals in terms provided by the homophobic community. It seems at
times as if we can no longer imagine anything more politically stimulating
than to struggle for acceptance as good soldiers, good priests, and good par-
ents. While I remain enough of a liberal to believe that we should defend
people’s rights to serve whatever worthy or unworthy cause inspires them,

I’m more excited by some glorious precedents for thinking of homosexuality
as truly disruptive—as a force not limited to the modest goal of tolerance
for diverse lifestyles, but perhaps even mandating the choice of an outlaw
existence. That choice (which I’ll elaborate on in a moment) would be quite
different from what currently passes for queer politics. Suspicious of any en-
forced identity, gays and lesbians play subversively—a word I’ve come to
distrust, since it doesn’t seem to mean much more than engaging in naughty
parodies—with normative identities, attempting, for example, to resignify
the family for communities that defy the usual assumptions about what con-
stitutes a family. These efforts can have assimilative rather than subversive
consequences; having de-gayed themselves, gays melt into the very culture
they like to think of themselves as undermining. Or, having “realistically”
abandoned what Steven Seidman, in his essay for Fear of a Queer Planet,
calls a “millenial vision” of dominations’s demise, we resign ourselves to
the micropolitics of local struggles for participatory democracy and social
justice—not shying away, as Seidman puts it, “from spelling out a vision of
a better society in terms resonant to policy makers and activists.” We thus
reveal political ambitions about as stirring as those reflected on the bumper
stickers that enjoin us to “think globally and act locally.”
Curiously enough, the assimilative tendency seems to coexist quite com-
fortably with what might seem to exclude it: gay and lesbian self-identification
in terms of other oppressed minorities. The aversion to homosexuality as an
identity has made us into identity-floaters: we wish to both join the ranks of
a heterosexual, family-oriented society and identify with the disenfranchised
people truly marginalized by that society. In their yearning to be subversive,
white middle-class gay men in particular have tended to either blur the dif-
ferences between themselves and other groups demonstrably more oppressed
than they are or suggest that those differences could be overcome by acts of
political good faith. The relation of gay men to feminism, for example, and
in particular to lesbian feminism, is bound to be more problematic than we
like to admit. It’s not simply that a white male, straight or gay, is more likely
to enjoy privileges in our society than, say, a black lesbian. We’re willing
enough to admit that; what’s more difficult to admit is our erotic complicity
with the distributors of power, with the ways in which our society defines the
sexiness of power. In “Is the Rectum a Grave?” I argued against a tendency
among gay activists to ignore the connections between political sympathies
and sexual fantasies and activities. There can be, I argued, a continuity be-
tween a sexual preference for rough and uniformed trade, a sentimentalizing
of the armed forces, and right-wing politics. At the very least, our feminist
sympathies will perhaps always be complicated by a narcissistic investment in
the objects of our desire. In his desires, the gay man runs the risk of identify-
ing with culturally dominant images of misogynistic maleness. A more or less
secret sympathy with heterosexual male misogyny carries with it the narcis-
sistically gratifying reward of confirming our membership in (and not simply
our erotic appetite for) privileged male society. The fantasy underpinnings of
gay men’s feminism become particularly fraught when our feminist allies are
lesbians. Indeed, it’s not difficult to appreciate why “fantasy” has become, in
certain activist circles, a politically suspect word. If we think of how remote
lesbian desiring fantasies are, by definition, from gay male desiring fanta-
sies, and if we acknowledge the influence of erotic investments on political
choices, then the very notion of fantasy could easily seem like a heterosexist
scheme to sow discord in the gay and lesbian community.
Queer critiques of homosexual identity have generally been desexualizing
discourses. You would never know, from many of the works I discuss in Ho-
mos, that gay men, for all their diversity, share strong sexual interest in other
human beings anatomically identifiable as male. Queer studies frequently
takes the sex out of being queer. “Queer” is preferred to “gay,” Michael War-
ner has suggested in Fear of a Queer Planet, in large part because of its sexu-
ally indeterminate reference; it becomes a universal political category, em-
bracing every one who resists “regimes of the normal.” (Since many gay men
apparently feel quite comfortable with those regimes, would they, unlike
many radical straights, be excluded from queerness?) At the same time, gay
literary studies, for example, is tireless in its pursuit of what is called homo-
eroticism in an astonishing number of significant writers from the past. We
end up with the implicit but no less extraordinary proposition that gays aren’t
homosexual but all straights are homoerotic. Given the terminological and
epistemological confusion all this creates, it might not be a bad idea to drop
the very category of homoeroticism, since it seems to me to be little more
than a provokingly tendentious way of asserting a certain sexual indetermi-
nacy in all human beings, a state of affairs hardly discovered by queer studies.
The confusion and the denials are all the more unfortunate since queer stud-
ies does, as Warner emphasizes, set out to make sexuality “a primary category
for social analysis.” But, with a few exceptions, this has merely added another
category to the analysis of social institutions (making explicit the prescriptive
assumptions about sexuality embedded within institutions) rather than trying
to trace the political productivity of the sexual. If queerness is to mean more
than simply taking sexuality into account in our political analyses, if it means
that modalities of desire are not only effects of social operations but are at the
core of our very imagination of the political and the social, then something
has to be said about how, in gay sexuality for example, erotic desire for the
same might affect, even revolutionize, our understanding of how the human
subject is, or might be, socially implicated.
It seems to me that the writers I discuss in Homos, especially Genet and
Gide, address this question. I chose them not because they are relevant to
specific policy issues that we might face today, but rather because they pro-
pose what are for the moment necessarily mythic reconfigurations of identity
and sociality. Alongside the indispensable work, for example, that has been
done in AIDS activism, we might also want to think about the ways in which
a radical gay or queer politics might emerge not only from a horrendous epi-
sode in medical history in which we have been among the principal victims,
but also from a gay specificity not dependent on such tragic contingencies.
Queer politics has been mainly a micropolitics focused on particular issues
which there is no reason to believe will ever be exhausted if the fundamental
types of community and relationality out of which such issues spring are not
in themselves questioned and redefined. And this activity has to be, at least
for the moment, an activity of the intellectual imagination, one for which
the micropoliticians often have no use or patience but which seems to me as
indispensable, no more of a luxury, than our immediate and vital concrete
struggles.
At his or her best, the homosexual is a failed subject, one that needs its
identity to be cloned, or inaccurately replicated, outside of it. This is the
strength, not the weakness, of homosexuality, for the fiction of an inviolable
and unified subject has been an important source of human violence. Each
monad-like subject—whether it be a personal, ethnic, national, or racial
subject—feels obliged to arm itself against the difference embodied in other
subjects equally determined to defend their “integrity” against the Other. It
seems that the only way we can love the other or the external world is to find
ourselves somehow in it. Only then might there be a nonviolent relation
to the world that doesn’t seek to exterminate difference. The homosexual,
perhaps even the homosexual as a category (what I have called “homoness”)
rather than as a person (for very often the culturally elaborated differences
between the sexes are reconstituted and played out between two men or
between two women) might be the model for correspondences of being that
are by no means limited to relations among persons. Indeed, the human
itself has no ontological priority here. Homoness can first be experienced as
a communication of forms, as a kind of universal solidarity not of identities
but of positionings and configurations in space, a solidarity that ignores even

the apparently most intractable identity-difference: between the human and
the nonhuman. The apprenticeship for a relationality founded on sameness
rather than on difference must perhaps first of all be a perceptual apprentice-
ship (in which art can play a central role) in correspondences that participate
in a single but vast family of forms in the universe. This may even involve
(as it does explicitly in Genet) what appears to be a betrayal, a radical anti-
relationality that may be the prerequisite negativity for an anti-identitarian
community. In homosexual sociality, it is perhaps our antimonogamous pro-
miscuity that best approximates this relational betrayal, a truly gay betrayal
that frees us from some of the benefits of a social assimilation to which some
of us understandably but no less sadly aspire.
4
Sociability and Cruising
Sociability is a form of relationality uncontaminated by desire.

I reformulate in this way—in this admittedly tendentious way—the argu-
ment made by Georg Simmel in his 1910 essay “The Sociology of Sociabil-
ity.” From Simmel’s description, we could view sociability as a paradoxical ef-
fect of our socializing impulses. “The higher unity which one calls ‘society,’”
he writes, is motivated by “interests”: “economic and ideal interests, warlike
and erotic, religious and charitable.” Such interests define the content of
groups. “But above and beyond their special content, all . . . associations are
accompanied by a feeling for, by a satisfaction in, the very fact that one is
associated with others and that the solitariness of the individual is resolved
into togetherness, a union with others.” Indeed “a feeling for the worth of
association as such” is involved in the very motives for association, and the
“objective content which carries the particular association along” may, Sim-
mel suggests, only later be called forth. The “special needs and interests” that
account for the “special content” of groups may, then, provide an inadequate
account of the very origin of groups. An initiating motive of social forma-
tions would be the impulse to develop the “special sociological structure” of
sociability—which is to say, a structure without motive, a structure, Simmel
argues, “corresponding to those of art and play, which draw their form from
these realities [those of our life interests] but nevertheless leave the irreality
behind them.” Like art and play, sociability “takes its substance from nu-
merous fundamental forms of serious relationships like among men,” but
Originally published in Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious no. 1 (2002): Sameness, 11–31.
s o c i a b i l i t y a n d c r u i s i n g | 46
it is precisely that substance which art, play and sociability leave behind,
presenting only “the pure, abstract play of form,” “a symbolically playing
fulness of life.”1
A pervasive theme in Simmel’s writing is the sacrifice of individuality
required by membership in groups. “The great problems placed before [the
ethical forces of concrete society] are that the individual has to fit himself
into a whole system and live for it: that, however, out of this system values
and enhancement must flow back to him, that the life of the individual is but
a means for the ends of the whole, the life of the whole but an instrument
for the purposes of the individual.” Because of “the seriousness, indeed the
frequent tragedy of these requirements,” sociability is all the more impres-
sive in that, having carried these requirements “over into its shadow world,
in which there is no friction,” they can be replayed—in, for example, “the
manner in which groups form and break up at parties,” conversations get
started and then break off without tragedy, allowing us to experience what
Simmel strikingly calls “the freedom of bondage.”2 Thus sociability solves
“the great problem of association”: “that of the measure of significance and
accent which belongs to the individual as such in and as against the social
milieu.”3 The problematic nature of groups that must at once curb and serve
individuality is resolved in sociability thanks to the particular pleasure gained
from the restriction of the personal: the pleasure of the associative process
itself, of a pure relationality which, beyond or before the satisfaction of par-
ticular needs or interests, may be at once the ground, the motive and the
goal of all relations.
Simmel’s essay more or less takes for granted the satisfaction inherent in
the abstraction of the relational from concrete relations. But why, exactly, is
pure relationality pleasurable? When Simmel speaks of “the pure, abstract
play of form” characteristic of sociability,4 he seems to mean a certain kind
of rhythmical play. Rhythm is what remains when content is stripped away.
Both the “objective qualities which gather about the personality” (“riches
and social position, learning and fame, exceptional capacities and merits
of the individual”) and “the most personal things—character, mood, and
fate”5—have no place in sociability, although the latter does keep what Sim-
mel calls a symbolic relation to all this content. Without content sociability
nonetheless imitates the rhythms of “real life.” In conversation, for example,
1. G Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, DN Levine (ed), Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1971, pp 127–29.
2. Ibid., pp 137–38. 4. Ibid., p 129.
3. Ibid., p 130. 5. Ibid., pp 130–31.
it is the movement of arguments rather than their substance that excites us—
such as “binding and loosening, conquering and being vanquished, giving
and taking.”6 Similarly, coquetry “plays out the forms of eroticism”; it moves
between “hinted consent and hinted denial,” “swings between yes and no,”
stopping at neither pole, divesting sexuality of consequential decisions.7 As
these examples suggest, the fundamental rhythm of sociability is “association
and separation.”8 The particular modes of sociable conduct—such as group
formation, conversation, coquetry—imitate the movement of individuals to-
ward and away from social systems which is for Simmel the principal object
of sociological study.
Because the movement never stops, nothing essential is lost in sociabil-
ity: neither the individual’s selfhood nor the advantage of living in groups.
But this very preservation is nonetheless predicated on sacrifice. We live
rhythmically only if we renounce possession. We don’t expect economic
advantages from entering into a group at a party; the “free moving play”9
of coquetry depends on the suspension of sexual demand; sociable conver-
sation does not definitively settle arguments. We can escape “the solitari-
ness of the individual” and enjoy “the pure essence of association”10 only
if we renounce, at least momentarily, the acquisitive impulses that draw
us into groups. In this account, the pleasure of sociability can’t help but
refer—negatively, as it were—to the conflicts and pressures generated by
those socializing impulses. Sociability gives us the pleasure of relief from
“the frictional relations of real life.”11 But there are hints in Simmel’s es-
say of a more radical view of the relation between pleasure and negativity.
The pleasure of sociability would not be merely that of a restful interlude
in social life. Instead, it would be the consequence of our being less than
what we really are. Simmel speaks of a lady who, while avoiding “extreme
décolletage in a really personal, intimate situation with one or two men,”
feels comfortable with it “in a large company.” “For she is,” he adds, “in
the larger company, herself, to be sure, but not quite completely herself,
since she is only an element in a formally constituted gathering.”12 It is
as if there were a happiness inherent in not being entirely ourselves, in be-
ing “reduced” to an impersonal rhythm. Here such rational explanations
as an escape from the solitariness of individual life, or the relief from con-
flicts with others, are no longer relevant. Neither, it seems to me, is any
6. Ibid., p 136. 10. Ibid., p 128.

7. Ibid., pp 134–35. 11. Ibid., p 129.
8. Ibid., p 138. 12. Ibid., p 131.
9. Ibid., p 135.
psychoanalytic account that would trace the pleasure of sociability either

to intersubjective desires or to a lost (if fantasmatic) jouissance. Perhaps
because as a sociologist Simmel is less interested in the genealogy of plea-
sure than in its social nature and function, his account of the satisfaction
sociability gives is at once somewhat unsatisfying and free of the assump-
tions governing most psychoanalytic thought. Simmel calls the pleasure
of sociability an “excitement,”13 and he seems to be positing a nonsexual
excitement, one that would be a function of a subject without personality,
of a partially dismantled subject. Considering all the interests and passions
we lay aside in order to enjoy sociability, we might speak of sociability as an
ascetic conduct. It is a self-disciplining that yields pleasure, or excitement.
It is not the disciplining itself that is felt as pleasure, so it would be a mistake
to speak of sociability as a form of masochism. Indeed, if there is a pleasure
accompanying the shedding of our interests, it is the nonmasochistic one
of escaping from the frictions, the pain, even the tragedy endemic to social
life. Once stripped of those interests, we discover a new type of being, as well
as a new type of pleasure. The pleasure does not serve an interest, satisfy a
passion, or fulfill a desire. It is an intransitive pleasure intrinsic to a certain
mode of existence, to self-subtracted being. A willingness to be less—a cer-
tain kind of ascetic disposition—introduces us (perhaps reintroduces us) to
the pleasure of rhythmed being.
Most profoundly, the pleasure of sociability is the pleasure of existing,
of concretely existing, at the abstract level of pure being. There is no other
explanation for that pleasure. It doesn’t satisfy conscious or unconscious
desires; instead, it testifies to the seductiveness of the ceaseless movement
toward and away from things without which there would be no particular
desires for any thing, a seductiveness that is the ontological ground of the
desirability of all things. Simmel ends his essay by proposing the ubiquity of
phenomena that, like sociability, represent what he calls the fundamental
reality of being. The play, the movement, the rhythm of that fundamental
reality inaccurately replicates itself in the multiple spectacles and conducts
of the phenomenal world. From the awe-inspiring rising and receding of the
ocean’s waves to the superficial chatter of the salon, being ceaselessly unveils
and plays itself in creation. That a phenomenon as commonplace as sociabil-
ity should be one of the bearers of this metaphysical weight perhaps suggests
the lightness of the burden itself, the kind of playful, impersonal narcissism
circulating within the proliferations of being. Sociability, as the great sociolo-
13. Ibid., p 136.

gist discovered, is the one social structure that owes nothing, in its essence,
to the sociology of groups.
I
“ t seems certain,” Freud writes in Group Psychology and the Analysis of
the Ego, “that homosexual love is far more compatible (than hetero-
sexual love) with group ties, even when it takes the shape of uninhibited
sexual impulsions—a remarkable fact, the explanation of which might carry
us far.”14
How far? And in what direction?
Freud never fully answers these questions, although Group Psychology
is not the only place in his work where he proposes a marked compatibility
between sociality and homosexuality. Ten years earlier, in his account of
Dr. Schreber’s paranoia, he had spoken of the persistence of homosexual
tendencies “after the stage of heterosexual object-choice has been reached.”
“ . . . Merely deflected from their sexual aim . . . , they now combine with
portions of the ego-instincts and . . . help to constitute the social instincts,
thus contributing an erotic factor to friendship and comradeship, to esprit
de corps and to the love of mankind in general.”15 Not only that: the “social
instincts” are even more finely developed in those who have failed to reach
the stage of heterosexual object-choice: “ . . . It is not irrelevant to note,”
Freud concludes, “that it is precisely manifest homosexuals, and among
them again precisely those that struggle against an indulgence in sensual acts
[the passage quoted from Group Psychology modifies this by suggesting the
compatibility of “uninhibited” homosexual impulses with a special aptitude
for group ties], who distinguish themselves by taking a particularly active
share in the general interests of humanity—interests which have themselves
sprung from a sublimation of erotic interests.”16 Finally, in the short paper
“Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality,”
written early in 1921, just before he began the final version of Group Psy-
chology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud writes: “It is well known that a
good number of homosexuals are characterized by a special development of
their social instinctual impulses and by their devotion to the interests of the
community.”17
14. S. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), trans. J Strachey, New York:
WW Norton, 1959, p 95.
15. S Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (De-
mentia Paranoides)” (1911), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, J Strachey (ed), 24 vols, London: Hogarth, 1953–1974, 12:61.
16. Ibid., p 61.
17. S Freud, “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality” (1921), in
The Standard Edition, 18:232.
What Freud means by social feeling is more general than sociability. It

includes all those “interests”—the play of frequently conflicting passions and
ambitions—that are, for Simmel, suspended, at least ideally, during the so-
ciable gathering. The value of Simmel’s analysis nonetheless seems to me
to lie in the possibility of sociability as he defines it pointing, paradoxically,
to something beyond itself. That possibility has frequently been examined
in literary texts—in, for example, texts as different from one another as
Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme and Molière’s Le Misanthrope. In La
Chartreuse, Stendhal proposes the salon as a social, even a political model,
thus suggesting the relevance of sociability to sociality itself. In maintain-
ing the special aptitude of homosexuals for social feeling, Freud appears to
be arguing—fleetingly, to be sure—that a “devotion to the interests of the
community” might be inherent in a particular mode of sexual desire. It is
as if Freud were reserving a certain area of sexuality for a successfully civi-
lized relationality—a prospect absent (forgotten?) in the fierce antagonism
spelled out in Civilization and Its Discontents between individual happi-
ness and the interests of society. Nothing would be more surprising than to
find psychoanalysis granting this privilege to homosexuals. In contemporary
adventures—both straight and gay—of reimagining sociality and commu-
nity, psychoanalysis is notably absent, as a helpful source or reference, from
efforts to conceptualize a sociality no longer imprisoned within identitarian
ideologies. Not only that: for most queer theorists, psychoanalysis, even if it
were to be seen as welcoming such efforts, would necessarily exclude from
them what it considers as the “perversion” of homosexual desire. Can a re-
gression, even when it is no longer labeled a neurosis, have a place within
a utopic imagination? It will therefore be exceedingly strange to discover, at
the very origin of psychoanalysis, the outline of a conceptualising of queer
desire as somehow exempt from the destructive sociality of straight desire.
This is by no means the same thing as saying that gay and lesbian com-
munities, as they are currently constituted, offer persuasive evidence for
the speculative argument I will be making. Indeed, they rather confirm the
Foucaldian injunction to which I have already appealed: we must learn to
be gay. Psychoanalysis was not a place Foucault would have turned to in
order to find new relational modes, and I have myself recently specified
what seem to me the constitutive limitations of psychoanalytic thinking for
any such enterprise. That thought nonetheless remains indispensable not
only because it reminds us, as I have argued elsewhere, of the dangers at-
tached to the pastoralizing of any form of sexual relation, but also because it
points—hesitatingly, even unwillingly—to a sociality no longer governed by
the unavoidable aggressiveness accompanying what Lacan has analyzed as

the subject’s impossible and intractable demand for a sexual relation. Already
in Freud, however, a certain reflection on the sexual opens the way to a dis-
solving of the sexual in that impossible relation, and in so doing it encour-
ages reconfigurations of the social far more radical than those contemporary
queer attempts to present as revolutionary, as seriously threatening to the
dominant social order, such reformist, harmless, and familiar “innovations”
as gay marriage, public sex, or the corporate charities that have arisen in re-
sponse to the AIDS epidemic. Nothing we have imagined so far sufficiently
betrays the relational orders under which much of humanity continues to be
oppressed. While it has certainly served those orders in its emphasis on nor-
mative sexuality, psychoanalysis has from the beginning been subversive of
the dogmas thanks to which it became, in a relatively short period of time, a
respectable social institution. Specifically, Freud’s theoretical flirtation with
the idea of homosexuality as conducive to a “special development” of social
impulses can, so to speak, itself be speculatively flirted with to the point, as
we will now see, of yielding an astonishing yet plausible argument for a truly
sociable sexuality.
It’s true that the “particularly active share in the general interests of
humanity” which presumably characterizes homosexuals is, for Freud,
simply a more visible manifestation of the role of homosexuality in all
social feelings. In heterosexuals (as well, we might presume, as in those
homosexuals who “struggle against an indulgence in sexual acts”), ho-
mosexual tendencies are sublimated into friendship and esprit de corps.
Freud succinctly summarizes this view in “Some Neurotic Mecha-
nisms”: “In the light of psychoanalysis we are accustomed to regard so-
cial feeling as a sublimation of homosexual attitudes towards objects.”18
Furthermore, diverted from their original aims, these tendencies, no
longer capable of “really complete satisfaction,” Freud notes in Group
Psychology, are more likely “to create permanent ties” than if they had
remained uninhibited (and subject to the loss of energy consequent
upon the satisfaction of a directly sexual desire).19 And yet: Freud sug-
gests that the compatibility of homosexual tendencies with social feelings
does not depend on the mere availability of sexual energy from a stage
of desire that has, in the majority of cases, been left behind. Remember
that, according to the passage from Group Psychology, sociality is espe-
cially pronounced even when homosexual impulses have not been left
18. Ibid., 231.
19. S Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), p 91.
behind, remain uninhibited. There must be a specificity to the desire itself

that accounts for its socializing aptitude, even when the desire can no longer
be recognised in the cohesion and activities of groups.
“Some Neurotic Mechanisms” ends with the apparently casual observa-
tion that “in the homosexuals with marked social interests, it would seem
that the detachment of social feeling from object-choice has not been fully
carried through.”20 This thunderously obvious fact would have been an un-
necessary (and flat) conclusion to the preceding speculations of this essay if
it did not resonate—in ways Freud leaves unexamined—with both one of
Freud’s earlier etiologies of homosexual desire and the conceptually troubled
distinction put forward in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego be-
tween object-choice and identification. As his title indicates, in order to ex-
plain “group psychology”—and, more specifically, “the libidinal constitution
of groups”21—Freud finds it necessary to go back to “the analysis of the ego”
with which readers of his earlier papers “On Narcissism: An Introduction”
(1914) and “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) would be familiar. The study
of melancholia in particular, Freud recalls, had revealed “an ego divided,
fallen apart into two pieces, one of which rages against the second.” Here is
Freud’s description of the first ego-piece, a description most fully and most
famously elaborated a few years later in the discussion of the superego in The
Ego and the Id (1924): “It [the part of the ego that ‘rages against the second’]
comprises the conscience, a critical agency within the ego, which even in
normal times takes up a critical attitude towards the ego, though never so
relentlessly and so unjustifiably.”22
As it has frequently been observed in the literature devoted to the Freud-
ian notion of the ego ideal, the latter is at once loved as a source of nar-
cissistic satisfaction (it possesses “the perfections which we have striven to
reach for our own ego”23), and feared as a source of rageful moral (frequently
moralistic) demands made upon the ego. Most interestingly, the ego ideal
allows Freud to make a somewhat tortuous distinction between object-love
and identification. In an extraordinary paragraph in which Freud abandons
and reinvents his analytical arguments and terms as he goes along, that dis-
tinction is at once affirmed and questioned. In attempting “to define the
difference between identification and such extreme developments of being
in love as may be described as ‘fascination’ or ‘bondage,’” Freud finally settles
22. Ibid., p 52.
23. Ibid., p 56.
on a distinction between an object that has been lost with which the ego then
identifies and, in the “bondage” of love, a hypercathexis of the retained ob-
ject at the expense of the ego. But then he brings up yet another difficulty: “Is
it quite certain that identification presupposes that object-cathexis has been
given up? Can there be no identification while the object is retained?” The
question, Freud notes, is a “delicate” one, although he fails to embark upon a
discussion of it. Instead, he concludes with another alternative that, happily,
“embraces the real essence of the matter, namely, “whether the object is put
in the place of the ego or of the ego ideal.”24 It is as if the question of whether
the object must be lost or given up before identification can take place—in
other words, the question of whether identification and object-cathexis can
coexist—no longer needs to be answered if a “place” in the mind is invented
where the loved object can exist without being identified with. The ego ideal
comes to the rescue here: it is both an internalized otherness and an alien-
ated interiority, the loved object at an uncrossable distance from the ego
within the ego as well as the originally self-sufficient ego of primary narcis-
sism torn away from the ego and assimilated to a foreign body inhabiting an
ego it observes and judges.
It is the invention of the ego ideal, of a “differentiating grade in the ego”
(as Freud calls it in the title of Group Psychology’s final chapter) that has
allowed Freud to elude the possibility of (a nonpathological) object-love as
self-love. Identification in the official Freudian scheme is either the most
primitive of emotional ties to an object, or, regressively, a substitute for a lost
object-tie. It can, Freud maintains in Group Psychology, involve recognition
of “a common quality shared with some other person” only if that person “is
not an object of the sexual instinct.”25 What is inconceivable in the Freudian
scheme is identification as libidinal recognition. But this is not quite accu-
rate; it is conceived of within the Freudian scheme, but only as a perversion.
And it is of course the perversion of homosexuality. In his study of Leonardo
da Vinci, Freud proposes an account of male homosexual desire which he
refers to in both “Some Neurotic Mechanisms” and Group Psychology. After
a long and intense fixation upon his mother, the budding homosexual does
not abandon her at the end of puberty but rather “identifies himself with her;
he transforms himself into her, and now looks about for objects which can
replace his ego for him, and on which he can bestow such love and care as
he has experienced from his mother.”26 The renunciation of women as love-
objects means that “all rivalry with [the father] (or with all men who may
24. Ibid., p 58. 26. Ibid., p 51.
25. Ibid., p 50.
take his place) is avoided.” Freud adds that “the retiring in favor of the father
. . . may be ascribed to the castration complex.”27 This is of course a very
familiar psychoanalytic “reduction” of homosexuality, and it is one that most
self-respecting queers find both obsolete and offensive. There is, however,
as we say today, a gay-friendly way of reading this account, one that in fact
turns it against itself. First of all, the relevance of that reference to the castra-
tion complex is by no means certain. Freud’s hypothetical homosexual has
after all really not abandoned his mother, but neither has he fantasmatically
struggled with his father in order to have her. The Oedipal rivalry—which
“should” end with the boy giving up his passionate attachment to his mother
in order to avoid threatened castration at the hands of the father—has simply
been bypassed by an identification that is neither a loss nor object-love in the
usual sense.
Lacan would say that perversion denies castration—but even the Laca-
nian promotion of castration from an Oedipal fantasy to the meta-genital
status of a lost plenitude of being does not prove the necessity of any type of
“deniable” castration for a theory of desire. Castration from a retroactively
fantasised fullness of being from which our entry into language severed us
is perhaps itself the fantasy of a fantasy. This conceptual meta-fanstasy may
be dictated by a heterosexual inability to think of desire other than as lack
or loss. It is the final step in a generalizing of privation consequent upon the
dependence of male heterosexual desire on a rivalry that one has not exactly
overcome but which has more simply and more catastrophically ended in
defeat. All heterosexual desire, according to the terms of that very discipline
that has argued for the psychic (not to mention moral) superiority of hetero-
sexual desire, can’t help but be to some degree conditioned by the memory,
or the fantasy, of that defeat. The heterosexual male’s rageful resentment
at the victorious father must, in what are hardly negligible aftereffects, find
expression not only in the antagonism toward other men which, according
to Freud himself, makes heterosexual social feeling less developed than ho-
mosexual social feeling, but also in a misogynous aggressiveness toward all
those women who, to some degree, can’t help but be seen as mere sub-
stitutes for an abandoned, irreplaceable, supreme object of love. It would,
then, hardly be surprising if, far from being a secondary manifestation of a
fall from Being, Oedipal castration were the source and the motivation for
elaborations—satisfying to the psychanalytic ego—of an ontological cut or
castration.
The psychoanalytically defined homosexual, on the other hand, in spite

of psychoanalysis’s best—or worst—intentions, is (at least insofar as he is
exclusively homosexual, which of course he never is) a stranger to these mur-
derous passions—perhaps, most fundamentally and most beneficently, to
passion itself. He wanders in the world—cruises the world, we might almost
say—in search of objects that will give him back to himself as a loved and
cared for subject. Homosexual desire for others is, in this account, motivated
by the wish to treat oneself lovingly. It gives an affirmative answer to the ques-
tion Freud asks but finds unnecessary to answer in Group Psychology and
the Analysis of the Ego: Can there be identification when the object of love
is retained? The man Freud describes a few pages before asking this ques-
tion chooses love-objects because he identifies with them. He has, it’s true,
lost himself when he identifies with his mother, and so he “looks about for
objects which can replace his ego for him,”28 but he will identify with those
objects without introjecting them. Contrary to the usual Freudian sequence
of a loss compensated for by fantasy-identification with the lost object, in
the scenario of homosexual desire the subject has himself managed the loss
(presumably by placing his mother in the position of his ego) and, most
importantly, the loss is made up for not by another introjection but by new
relations with new love-objects.
I am not anxious to defend the clinical truth of what might be called the
Leonardo-factor in Freud’s account of homosexual desire. Instead, let’s con-
sider that account as a myth analogous to (if less satisfying poetically than)
Aristophanes’ myth in the Symposium. Both stories emphasize what I have
called in my discussion of Plato’s dialogue our at-homeness in the world.29
Every subject reoccurs differently everywhere. “Differently” is crucial: it is
the recognizing and longing for sameness that allows us to relate lovingly
to difference. A certain homosexualizing of heterosexual love can make
this privilege universal. Just as homosexual desire can never be entirely free
of “paternal” Law having rendered otherness unknowable, prohibited and
intrinsically hostile, so heterosexual desire must contain—however much
it seeks to occlude—the recognition that difference can be loved as the
nonthreatening supplement of sameness. I would even go so far as to say
that the homosexual way into this recognition is a pis aller, something like
a second-best solution. Without in any way denying the immense range
of differences that can be accommodated by homosexual love, we might
29. See Leo Bersani, “Sociality and Sexuality,” Critical Inquiry, vol 26, no 1 (Summer 2000), pp
641–56.
also acknowledge the even rarer opportunity in heterosexual love for a

nonmurderous wonder at difference. While, as it has been vehemently
argued in recent years, sexual difference has been prejudicially sanctified
in our psychoanalytically oriented culture as the ground of all difference, it
perhaps does have a unique epistemological function in human growth as
an early and crucial model for structuring difference. The ego ideal is the
psychoanalytic myth that reifies the traumatic component of sexual differ-
ence. It refers to the mental resource that allows the subject permanently
to judge others as resistant to an identification based on recognition—and,
correlatively, to stigmatize the external world as constitutively alien and
hostile to the self. Hatred of the world, as Freud writes in “Instincts and
Their Vicissitudes,” “always remains in an intimate relation with the self-
preservative instincts.”30 The impossible demand upon a world in which
I am nowhere to be found, where self-recognition would always be a mis-
take, is that the world provide exact replications of myself, that in fact it
be erased and replaced by the specular mirage of a universalized selfhood.
But since those hated alien objects also elicit desire, since no human sub-
ject can survive walled in by a wholly narcissistic love, the subject loves
and hates, desires and fears, the same object—a situation duplicated in
Freud’s description of the ego’s relation to the ego ideal (or the superego).
The latter eroticizes interdiction (which is perhaps itself merely the escape
route from otherness, the subject’s willed flight from traumatically differ-
ent objects—a flight transformed into a command from the outside), and
interdiction, the Law, becomes a privileged source of the very jouissance
it forbids.
The ability to identify with the loved object—that which Freud sees as
one of the sources of the “problem” of homosexuality—allows for a very dif-
ferent relation to the world. The subject’s productive illusion of becoming
one with a loved parental caregiver is the useful pretext for the subject to
go searching for him- or herself in the world. The self-preservative hatred
of objects, never entirely eradicated, can at least become secondary to an
object-love identical to self-love. A self-love hospitable to difference: misrec-
ognition here is not the fateful error of imaginary specularization, but rather
both describes the accommodating of difference by sameness and becomes
the motive for continuing the search. As in Aristophanes’ myth, we can never
find our “original nature,” or, in Freud’s terms, the ego we need to replace.
Finally, however, both myths are somewhat diverting misrepresentations of
30. S Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915), The Standard Edition, 14:139.
our presence in the world. They divert us—I mean they turn us away from our
presence already there. Plato and Freud narrativize that presence as a being
we once had but have lost or given up. Thus the subject is—touchingly but
erroneously—made the agent of its reoccurences outside itself. If, as I have
been proposing here and elsewhere, we are in the world before we are born
into it, this is not because we once—historically or mythically—possessed
ourselves, but rather because it is impossible to take on a form—a being—to
which the world does not have a response, with which it is not already in
correspondence.
C ruising is sexual sociability. The danger associated with cruising is not

that it reduces relations to promiscuous sex, but rather that the promis-
cuity may stop. Few things are more difficult than to block our interest in
others, to prevent our connection to them from degenerating into a “rela-
tionship.” In the model of cruising implicitly proposed by both the Freudian
account of homosexual desire and Aristophanes’ fable in the Symposium,
the search for the self out there can only be beneficently fruitless. The boys
Leonardo may love as his mother loved him are of course not exactly Leo-
nardo, and Aristophanes notes, in what I take to be a tone of ironic resigna-
tion, “ . . . the nearest approach to [our exactly identical other half] is best in
present circumstances . . . Love does the best that can be done for the time
being.”31 This erotic best is faithful to an ontological truth: the replications of
being are always, however minutely, inaccurate replications.
In, however, an imperceptible but momentous shift of psychic registers,
the object of desire can evoke not the loving mother but, instead, the im-
penetrable mother, the mother whose terrifying unintelligibility we domesti-
cated by assimilating it into a narrative of paternal interdiction. The object of
desire is now an object of fascination; he or she reactivates a world in which
the subject is nowhere to be found, one of pure otherness. The world has
become, again, what Laplanche has called the enigmatic signifier who sent
us, who appears to be sending us once again, messages we can’t process, or
“metabolize.”32 The sign and consequence of this resurrection of the enig-
matic signifier in an object of desire is sexual passion. In an extraordinary
passage of Un Amour de Swann, Proust exactly dates the shift I’m speaking
of in Swann’s relation to Odette. It occurs when, having failed to appear at
31. Plato, The Symposium, trans. A Nehemas and P Woodruff, in Complete Works, JM Cooper
(ed), Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997, p 476.
32. See J Laplanche, Seduction, Translation, Drives, J Fletcher and M Stanton (eds), London:
Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992.
a party where Swann had expected her, Odette is metamorphosed from an

object of noninsistent sensual interest into an être de fuite, a creature whose
inaccessibility has become her very essence. Searching for her throughout
the night in the restaurants and on the streets of Paris, Swann brushes past
the dim forms of other women, “as though among the phantoms of the dead,
in the realms of darkness, he had been searching for a lost Eurydice.”33 He
has indeed changed realms, or worlds—or, more exactly, it is Odette who
has moved into a world that can be “known” only as a place where Swann
is not. Thus his love becomes the constantly renewed epistemological de-
feat of, to adopt Lacan’s term, the desire of / for her desire. Swann’s sexual
fascination, bizarrely yet logically, has little to do with Odette’s body. Odette
as enigmatic signifier can be “metabolized” not if she lets herself, to use a
phrase Proust mocks, be possessed by him, but only if she allows her desire to
be inhabited by Swann’s consciousness. Constitutively, this is what she can’t
allow, for in the crisis of his nocturnal search for Odette, Swann himself dis-
appeared, and Odette has become nothing more—and, more portentously,
nothing less—than the place where he may be hidden, hidden, moreover, as
unimaginable otherness. And it is in defining erotic desire as epistemologi-
cal catastrophe that Proust himself becomes a novelist of heterosexual—or,
at least, heteroized—love. The note of condescending acceptance towards
Proust’s homosexuality that enters into many admiring critical commentar-
ies on A la recherche du temps perdu is wholly unnecessary. In its somber
glamorizing of a desire grounded in the irreducible opposition between an
empty subject and objects of desire that might but won’t reveal and return
the subject to himself, Proust masochistically celebrates difference as the
very condition of desire, thus renouncing the privilege his homosexuality
might have afforded him of recognizing, and loving, himself in an hospitably
familiar otherness.
“What makes homosexuality ‘disturbing,’” Foucault remarked in a 1981 in-
terview, is “the homosexual mode of life, much more than the sexual act itself.”
He spoke of “a homosexual ascesis that would make us work on ourselves and
invent—I don’t say discover—a manner of being that is still improbable.”34
Ascesis—a central concept in Foucault’s study of ancient Greek and Roman
“practices of the self” in volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality—would
be perhaps the principal strategy in any attempt “to become gay,” which
33. M Proust, Swann’s Way / Remembrance of Things Past, trans. CK Scott Moncrieff and T Kilmar-
tin, New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1989, p 252.
34. M Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life” (1981), in Ethics / Subjectivity and Truth, vol 1 of Es-
sential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, P Rabinow (ed), New York: The New Press, 1997, pp 136–37.
Foucault understood as radically different from merely “being homosexual.”

In another interview, Foucault specified that he was taking ascesis “in a very
general sense—in other words, not in the sense of a morality of renunciation
but as an exercise of the self on the self by which one attempts to develop
and transform oneself, and to attain to a certain mode of being.”35 While
appearing to dismiss “the sexual act itself” as irrelevant to the elaboration of
a new “mode of life” (as well as to the fear and hostility with which much of
straight society responds to gays), Foucault also asked the interesting ques-
tion: “How can a relational system be reached through sexual practices?”36
Rather than think of sexuality as “the secret of the creative cultural life,” he
encouraged us “to create a view of cultural life underneath the ground of
our sexual choices.”37 “The desexualization of pleasure” (we should perhaps
specify: the degenitalizing of pleasure) Foucault found in gay S & M had, he
seemed to think, important cultural or relational implications. S & M would
help to undermine more general systems of domination modeled on a sexual
ideology in which sexual passivity has been, as Foucault put it, “isomorphic”
with social inferiority. S & M, Foucault claimed, has helped to “alleviate
[the] problem” of men thinking of themselves as natural masters because and
only if they are never on the bottom, always on top.38
In Homos, I expressed my skepticism about the viability of S & M—a
practice constitutively committed, it seems to me, to the idolatry of
power—for such major relational shifts. In cruising I’m proposing another
sexual model—one in which a deliberate avoidance of relationships might
be crucial in initiating, or at least clearing the ground for, a new relation-
ality. Having criticized queer theorists for proposing such things as public
sex or the nonmonogamous gay couple as examples of the new relational
modes Foucault urged us to invent, I certainly don’t mean to offer the
centuries-old practice of cruising as a more authentic relational invention.
Since we are not going to reinvent relationality ex nihilo, the point is to see
how certain familiar practices—such as S & M, public sex, sexually unstable
intimacies—have or do not have the potential for tracing what Foucault also
called “new-alliances and. . . . unforseen lines of force.”39 The fact that the
practices just referred to are generally condemned outside the circles that
engage in them can hardly be said to certify their relational inventiveness.
35. M Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom” (1984), in Eth-
ics, p 282.
36. M Foucault, “Friendship” interview, in Ethics, p 137.
37. M Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” (1982), in Ethics, p 164.
38. M Foucault, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act” (1982), in Ethics, p 152.
39. M Foucault, “Friendship” interview, in Ethics, p 136.
An understandable but unfortunate queer response to this condemnation

has been, on the one hand, the untenable suggestion that these practices are
something new and, on the other, that, contrary to what most people think,
they are perfectly consistent with human decency, integrity and dignity. This
second argument defeats the first; it brings us right back to values embraced
(if obviously not invented) by homophobic “morality.” In short, these defen-
sive arguments insufficiently betray the relational modes sanctified by the
dominant culture. Does cruising make us feel as, perhaps even more, worthy
than a comfortably monogamous straight couple—in which case cruising
becomes even less interesting than marriage—or does it help us to at least
glimpse the possibility of dismissing moral worthiness itself, of constructing
human subjects whom such moral categories would fail to “cover”? In other
words, it is not a question of demonstrating that certain outrageous practices
are really taking place within the parameters of a traditional ethics, but rather
of specifying the ways in which those practices may or may not require us to
elaborate new ethical vocabularies.
Cruising, like sociability, can be a training in impersonal intimacy. The
particularity that distinguishes it from sociability is, of course, that it brings
bodies together. It is as if the game of coquetry described by Simmel moved
into a sexual relation—but one to which Simmel’s description of a nonsexual
coquetry would still apply. Simmel, we remember, speaks of the coquette
not being quite herself. She is, as we all are when we are sociable according
to Simmel, somewhat less than herself; the game goes on only if her pas-
sions and practical interests stay out of the game. Similarly, in cruising—at
lest in ideal cruising—we leave our selves behind. The gay bathhouse is es-
pecially favorable to ideal cruising because, in addition to the opportunity
anonymous sex offers its practitioners of shedding much of the personality
that individuates them psychologically, the common bathhouse uniform—a
towel—communicates very little (although there are of course ways of wearing
a towel . . . ) about our social personality (economic privilege, class status, taste).
Most important, the intimacy of bodies no longer embellished or impov-
erished, protected or exposed, by the “clothing” of both dress and character
is an exceptional experience of the infinite distance that separates us from
all otherness. Psychological and social difference forecloses this naked (in
more than one sense) perception of otherness. Differences traumatize and
fascinate us; they inspire our aggressiveness but also our tolerance; they are
never totally nonnegotiable. It seems to me useful to distinguish between
these differences and the more than physical distance—the metaphysical
distance—that always, and irremediably, separates the subject from other-
ness. The otherness I refer to is one that cannot be erased or even reduced
by the inaccurate replications that, by inviting multiple and diverse self-
recognitions, make of the world a hospitable space in which the subject
ceaselessly, and always partially, reoccurs. Outside, even where I am again,
is, simply by virtue of its being outside, infinitely distant. The intimacy with
an unknown body is the revelation of that distance at the very moment we
appear to be crossing an uncrossable interval. Otherness, unlocatable within
differences that can be known and enumerated, is made concrete in the
eroticized touching of a body without attributes. A nonmasochistic jouis-
sance (one that owes nothing to the death drive) is the sign of that nameless,
identity-free contact—contact with an object I don’t know and certainly
don’t love and which has, unknowingly, agreed to be momentarily the incar-
nated shock of otherness. In that moment we relate to that which transcends
all relations.
For me, this illuminates the connection I have previously made, and
which has always remained somewhat mysterious to me, between jouissance
and ascesis. The jouissance of otherness has as its precondition the stripping
away of the self, a loss of all that gives us pleasure and pain in our negotiable
exchanges with the world. In the jouissance of otherness, an entire category
of exchange is erased: the category of intersubjectivity. This erasure is an
ascetic (not a masochistic) practice—a “practice of the self,” to use Fou-
cault’s term, but not in his sense of “an intensification of subjectivity,” nor
for the sake of self-domination or the domination of others. In ascetic erotic
contact, we lose much that is presumed to be “good” in sex (especially, it is
said, the heightened awareness of another person), but the nonattributable
intensity I’m attempting to evoke also makes impossible that envy of the
other’s different jouissance which nourishes homophobia and misogyny. In
“Is the Rectum a Grave?” I speculated on the fantasy, in heterosexual men,
of an intolerably alien ecstasy inherent in female sexuality and in gay male
sexuality. I now think that the hateful envy of that ecstasy is the envy of a
certain kind of death. The association of sex with death is familiar; I suggest
that this association is made when we feel that we can’t profit from it. More
specifically, it is the association of sex not with death but with dying. The
envied sexuality is the lived jouissance of dying, as if we thought we might
“consent” to death if we could enter it orgasmically.
The sexual sociability of cruising facilitates the move into what can only
be referred to by the oxymoron of metaphysical sociability. The inadequate
subjectivity that sociability requires—the self-subtraction—is, by definition,
the absence of those psychic, sexual and social differences in which sex
becomes secondary to the anguished dream of plotting our own dying. Our
task now might be to see how viable the relationality we have uncovered in
activities apparently so removed from—even antagonistic to—each other as
sociability and cruising might be for other types of connectedness. Foucault
wrote that “after Descartes, we have a nonascetic subject of knowledge.”40
Might the diffusion of certain ascetic practices threaten the security of that
“subject of knowledge”—and in particular the hyperbolic ego’s destructive il-
lusion of power over the objects of knowledge? In attempting to answer these
questions, we would of course be elaborating a new ethics. Let’s call this an
ecological ethics, one in which the subject, having willed its own lessness,
can live less invasively in the world. If our psychic center can finally seem
less seductive than our innumerable and imperfect reappearances outside, it
should then seem not only imperative but natural to treat the outside as we
would a home.
40. M Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” (1983), in Eth-
ics, p 279.
5
Aggression, Gay Shame, and

Almodóvar’s Art
Nothing is more absurd, Freud asserts in Civilization and Its Discontents

(1930), than what is perhaps the most cherished biblical commandment:
“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” This commandment, revered as
“one of the ideal demands” of civilized society, is “really justified by the fact
that nothing else runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man,”
which, Freud claims, dictates not that we love our neighbors, but rather that
we exploit them, rob them, rape them, murder them.” Much of Jacques La-
can’s 1959–60 seminar, “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,” and in particular the
March 20 lesson entitled “Love of one’s neighbor,” is a gloss on Freud’s pro-
foundly disabused view of the moral law that enjoins us to love others. The
way in which Freud confronts this commandment is, for Lacan, the very
heart of Civilization and Its Discontents: “. . . that is where he begins, where
he remains throughout, and where he ends up. He talks of nothing but that.”
“That,” for the Lacan of the ethics seminar, is the problem of evil as an in-
tractable murderousness constitutive of the human itself. If we dismiss—as it
seems to me we should—the more or less optimistic psychoanalytic theories
between Freud and Lacan, theories that would make us more or less happy
by way of such things as adaptation to the real and genital normalcy, then we
may judge the great achievement of psychoanalysis to be its attempt to ac-
count for our inability to love others, and ourselves. The promises of adaptive
balance and sexual maturity undoubtedly explain the phenomenal appeal
of psychoanalysis as therapy, but its greatness may lie in its insistence on a
Translation (by the author) of a lecture given to the Ecole lacanienne in Strasbourg, France, in 2003.
The discussion beginning on p. 76 was written in collaboration with Ulysse Dutoit.
a g g r e s s i o n , g ay s h a m e , a n d a l m o d ó va r ’ s a r t | 64
human destructiveness resistant to any therapeutic endeavors whatsoever.

This has little to do with sex, and we can distinguish between the practices
normally identified as sex and a permanent, irreducibly destructive disposi-
tion which such great figures of psychoanalytic theory as Freud, Laplanche
and Lacan more or less explicitly define as sexuality. In Freud, the connec-
tion between the destructive and the sexual is most apparent in Civiliza-
tion and Its Discontents, which, in all likelihood, explains the appeal of that
work for the Lacan of the ethics seminar. While insisting on the nonerotic
character of the aggressiveness presumably opposed to love, Freud at the
same time undermines his own resolutely embraced dualism by recognizing
the “extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment” that accompa-
nies satisfied aggression. Sex becomes sexuality when the pleasure of “losing
ourselves” in sex is interpretively remembered as a sign and a promise of the
painful ecstasy once gained from the shattering of consciousness and the
devastation of the world in the sexualized aggressiveness of infantile fantasy.
There is, then, a certain continuity between the pleasures of sex and the even
greater pleasure of a massive aggressiveness. But the latter is a sexual pleasure
which sex can’t give, to which sex is irrelevant.
Both the continuity and the incommensurability are simply and pro-
foundly designated by Lacan’s use of the word jouissance. Jouir is the French
word for coming, for having an orgasm. Lacanian jouissance unavoidably
evokes orgasmic pleasure, but it pushes pleasure beyond itself, to the point
of becoming the enemy of pleasure, that which lies “beyond the pleasure
principle.” “ . . . My neighbor’s jouissance,” Lacan states in the March 20
Lesson of the Ethics Seminar, “his harmful, malignant jouissance, is that
which poses a problem for my love”—the insurmountable problem of an
ecstasy dependent (for both my neighbor and myself ) on my being destroyed.
Jouissance accompanies the “unfathomable aggressivity” that I find at the
heart of both the other’s love for me and my love for the other—an aggres-
sivity which, as Freud demonstrates in Civilization and Its Discontents, can
become even more ferociously destructive of the (internalized) other when
the subject turns it against himself. The other as prohibitive Law becomes
permanently available as both an object of vengeful attack and the moral
voice that at once thwarts and nourishes forbidden desires. With the reign of
the superego, sexuality is, as it were, born again as psychic violence; desire
is satisfied as rage, from which it can become inseparable. To follow Freud
in Civilization and Its Discontents is, as Lacan claims, to conclude that “we
cannot avoid the formula that jouissance is evil.”
With the notion of jouissance—in fact, already with the Freudian notion
of the “extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment” that (Freud

acknowledges in Civilization and Its Discontents) is at once the sadistic
and masochistic benefit of “the blindest destructive fury”—psychoanalysis
formulates an irreducible “evil” in the human psyche. Individual histories
are irrelevant to this destructiveness, as is perhaps history tout court; it is
not determined or fundamentally affected by gender differences or by dif-
ferences of sexual preference. It is postulated as a universal property of the
human psyche, something as species-specific as the human aptitude for ver-
bal language. The immense psychological edifice of psychoanalytic theory
(the stages of sexual maturation, the shapes and outcomes of the Oedipus
complex, the interpretation of dreams, the analysis of symptoms, the clas-
sifications of neuroses and psychoses, the mechanisms of repression and sub-
limation, the illuminations and subterfuges of memory) is, from the point
of view of the intractable human impulse to destroy, merely a distraction, a
Pascalian divertissement that nourishes therapeutic commerce. In telling us
that the greatest human happiness is exactly identical to the greatest human
unhappiness, psychoanalysis at once “explains” a violence that no individual
or social transformations would eliminate and renders superfluous any fur-
ther explanations. The jouissance inherent in that violence is the final cause
of our desires, the cause (in Lacanian terms) to which no object of our desires
ever corresponds.
There may, however, be a “beyond jouissance.” By this I do not mean that
we can be “cured” of the drive that continuously threatens individuals and
civilization, that it can somehow be done away with. Rather, just as the death
drive does not eliminate the pleasure principle in Freud, what I have in mind
would not erase jouissance but might play to the side of it, supplement it with
a pleasure at once less intense and more seductive. But the effectiveness of
this other seduction first of all depends on a painful acknowledgment of
jouissance as perhaps our most cherished property. It is only by thinking psy-
choanalytically that we will be able to experience the limits of psychoanalytic
thought. If, however, we consider the death drive as crucial to psychoanaly-
sis’s self-discovery—that is, the articulation of its own specificity—then it is
doubtful that psychoanalysis can help us to define an other order of pleasure.
How, then, might we best approach the mode of being that makes that plea-
sure available to us?
I t is doubtful that queer theory will be helpful in this enterprise. The

most striking aspect in the evolution of this theory has been a somewhat
troubled reflection on the question of sexual identity. Homos was largely a
reaction to the first phase of this reflection. Inspired by Foucault (or claiming
to be inspired by Foucault), several of the early texts of the queer movement
defiantly challenged the ways in which a dominantly heterosexual culture
has defined and categorized homosexuality. But the anti-identitarian politics
of queer theory risked erasing the specificity of homosexual desire by defining
as “queer” that which resists the regime of the normal. This criterion, while
accepting a large number of heterosexuals as queer, implicitly denied that
privilege to quite a few gays and lesbians. Recently, however, there have been
some interesting attempts to trace a gay subjectivity, attempts that inevitably
give some psychic density to the polemical definition of queer as resistance to
normativity. On the one hand, given my criticism of queer theory in Homos,
I can only applaud this development. When such eminent queer thinkers as
Didier Eribon and David Halperin set out to investigate the contours of a gay
subjectivity, I’m surprised and delighted to find a similarity, however general
it may be, to my own efforts to define a gay specificity. Furthermore, we agree
in our emphasis on the difference between this subjectivity or specificity and
an essentialist identity.
But the agreement stops there, and “there” is first of all the point where
psychoanalysis is called upon—or not called upon—to play a role. The gay
mistrust of psychoanalysis was for a long time, and still is to a certain extent,
wholly justified. Queer critics have had no trouble finding evidence of a ho-
mophobia perhaps made inevitable by the normative bias of psychoanalysis.
(In their Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand
Pontalis note that Freud and all the psychoanalysts who have followed him
have spoken of a “normal” sexuality, since “the very notion of development
presupposes a norm.”) But things have changed somewhat, thanks in large
measure to the attempts of the Ecole lacanienne, and of Jean Allouch in par-
ticular, to establish a positive moral and intellectual connection between psy-
choanalysis and all those associated with gay and lesbian studies in France,
and perhaps especially in the United States. Given this development, the
persistent hostility of queer thinkers toward psychoanalysis is all the more
surprising. I of course don’t mean that the sympathy of certain analysts in
itself justifies giving up a healthily suspicious approach to psychoanalysis.
It’s possible to participate in a dialogue with psychoanalysis—Didier Eribon
is the best example of this—and remain convinced that psychoanalysis is
constitutively unable to imagine a dynamically viable gay subjectivity, and
in particular, as I will argue in my discussion of Almodóvar, the relation
of homosexuality to the cultivation of an aesthetic subject. But we may be
perplexed by the antipsychoanalytic virulence of many queers (evident in
two 2003 American colloquia, on gay shame, at the University of Michigan,

and on queer sexuality, at Northwestern University). A flagrant example of
this hostility was the uncritical acceptance of the suggestion made by one of
the colloquia participants that that the death drive is a psychoanalytic inven-
tion that easily, perhaps even intrinsically, lends itself to homophobic inten-
tions. That such a proposal could be received almost as if it were a truism
is astonishing enough; even more stupefying is the apparent compatibility,
in the most eminent queer circles, of the rejection of psychoanalysis with a
marked interest in an especially flat version of ego psychology. It’s as if certain
thinkers had made the apparently surprising discovery that it’s very difficult
to banish all references to the operations of the psyche when we speak of
subjectivity. But since many queer intellectuals have decided to reduce those
operations to the ways in which individual subjects receive social messages
(either identifying with them or resisting them), to be a subject is conceived
of as determined entirely by intersubjectivity. My subjectivity is the mes-
sages others send me; my self-image is the image I receive from them. In the
case of an oppressed minority subjectivity, the self can hardly avoid being
contaminated by a paranoid mistrust of those specular others who possess its
alienated identity. To study the mechanisms by which the subject receives,
and acknowledges, this imposed identity (as well as the alienating strategies
themselves) would be the first step in resisting the imaginary subjectivities
elaborated by the dominant culture.
The queer thinkers who would embrace this account of subjectivity have
quite logically found in the originator of Affect Theory, Silvan Tomkins, a
major intellectual inspiration. This psychological theorist, who has been
highly praised by Eve Sedgwick and whose thought has been important for
recent work by Michael Warner, makes a sharp distinction between affects
and drives. Indifferent to drives, he has devoted himself to exhaustive stud-
ies of the various manifestations on the human face of the entire range of
emotions. Our eyes, he teaches us, receive and send messages from all the
affects (divided between “good” and “bad” affects). Shame, by virtue of its
heightening the face’s visibility, nearly has the status of the ideal emotion for
Affect Theory. In shame, he writes in volume 2 of Affect Imagery Conscious-
ness (1963), the eyes turn away from the object and are, so to speak, directed
back to the subject’s own face: full of ambivalence, he looks at himself be-
ing looked at. Tomkins’s work monumentally celebrates the visibility of the
human subject’s depths. Affect Theory is a catalogue of the expressive vicis-
situdes of intersubjectivity. It derives from the staggeringly banal observation
that “all human beings inevitably have interpersonal experiences in which
others express the primary affects and in which these are activated in the self.
This is the basis for the construction of a whole series of Images in which
the other is excited, or smiling, or ashamed, or contemptuous, or angry and
afraid of crying and in which the self is made to feel one or another of these
primary affects.”
How can we explain the interest of such eminent thinkers as Eve Sedg-
wick and Michael Warner in such platitudes? Let’s first of all note what is
excluded by this psychologism. Drives, first of all, as Tomkins himself points
out. His theory assumes that my field of action is reactive—a response to
the invasive images that would constitute my subjectivity. There is no place,
most notably, for a destructive movement (toward the other or toward myself )
that might take place outside the intersubjective field, that would not be de-
termined and justified by the emotions transmitted to me. Or, in other terms,
there would be no place for a jouissance produced by the destructiveness at
once promised and remembered as inherent in that jouissance. Significantly,
queer theory expresses great interest in shame—not in guilt, but in shame.
Shame is an eminently social emotion; others make me feel it. Consequently,
shame is accompanied by innocence; we might even say that it is a sign of
innocence. Nothing would be more foreign, and disagreeable, to Tomkins’s
admirers than Freud’s claim in Civilization and Its Discontents that the sense
of guilt does not depend on our being blamed, or praised, by others for our
desires and actions. The great appeal of Tomkins’s thought is, it seems to me,
that it relieves the subject—and in particular the gay subject—from all guilt.
The unsaid implication of the argument that psychoanalysis has used the
death drive to further a homophobic plot is that the death drive doesn’t exist
in homosexuals. Unlike guilt, shame is in perfect symmetry with the external
world. Shame has nothing to do with my own drives, with my own secret
pleasures; it is entirely what others make me feel. Shame therefore fully justi-
fies an aggressiveness toward a hateful world intent on destroying me, and the
only question raised by shame is, as Sedgwick says, how it can be transformed
into a sense of the subject’s value, or dignity. With a little work on our part,
shame can mutate into pride. Militant queer groups in San Francisco and
New York have chosen to call themselves Gay Shame. Reproaching the Gay
Pride movement for an assimilationist mania that has led it to demand little
more from a heterosexist and homophobic society than its recognition of
gays as good husbands, good priests, and good soldiers, Gay Shame proudly
chooses the counterslogan “Fuck Gay Pride.” Thus gays proudly accept the
very insults meant to reduce them to silence and, ideally, invisibility.
The situation is of course a delicate one. It’s true that a heterosexist cul-
ture seeks to overwhelm homosexuals with shame, and, as the Gay Shame
militants affirm, there are certainly better ways of fighting shame than to
eagerly embrace the norms of the dominant culture. But we will never par-
ticipate in the invention of what Foucault called “new relational modes” if
we merely assert the dignity of a self we have been told to be ashamed of.
Instead, we might begin by recognizing an abject destructiveness irreducible
to intersubjective power plays, a destructive drive from which no human
subject is entirely free. The gay specificity I spoke of in Homos is based on
the assumption that a desire for sameness, while it is always vulnerable to a
hyperbolizing of an image of the self, can also initiate the subject to a seduc-
tive self-dissolution, or, more exactly, to his or her partial, fugitive, and mo-
bile extensions or reappearances in the external world. Only a subject aware
of living within these multiple correspondences with an otherness that both
replicates and exceeds the subject can experience a sensual pleasure which,
while it may be unable to eliminate the drive to erase all otherness, can at
least be a kind of therapeutic or civilizing supplement to that drive. I associ-
ate this sensual pleasure with a new relational mode that might be the result
of an aesthetic subjectification. “The loss of the self,” Marcel Jouhandeau
wrote in his 1939 book De l’abjection, “is the concern of all being,” which is
to say that self-loss is an ontological imperative. But it does not have to be a
question, as it was for Jouhandeau, of losing oneself in God, but rather of the
subject losing himself in order to find himself again (but now unidentifiable)
disseminated among the appearances of the visible world.
In a 2002 essay entitled “Sociability and Cruising,” I spoke of sexual cruis-
ing as an ascesis. Cruising can be an apprenticeship in impersonal intimacy.
Like the sociability described by Georg Simmel, the anonymity and the mul-
tiplicity of sexual partners involve a certain self-subtraction, a diminishing
of our subjectivity—or, in other terms, a suspension of the psychological,
social, and professional interests that constitute a person’s individuality. The
connection between this reduction of the subject and anonymous promiscu-
ity can be seen very clearly in Catherine Millet’s remarkable book The Sexual
Life of Catherine M. (English-language edition published in 2002). For Cath-
erine M., self-reduction is also an expansion, one that depends, however,
on the loss of that which constitutes an individual identity. If Catherine M.
enjoys above all being fucked by several men in total darkness, it is because of
the pleasure she feels being engulfed in “an undifferentiated sheet of flesh.”
In sex, Catherine M. loses all awareness of herself as a body circumscribed in
space (“the body’s frontiers are dissolved,” she writes)—that is to say, as a vis-
ible “representative” of the ego which, according to Freud, is itself a mental
projection of the body’s surface. She speaks of her “great joy” experienced
“when bodies, pressed together, have the sensation of unfolding.” Fucking
outdoors (“en plein air”), Catherine M. discovers the literal accuracy of the
expression “s’envoyer en l’air” (to get off sexually; literally: “to be sent in the
air”): terraces, a roadside, country fields are places where “I find it good to be,
like them, open.” She distances herself from herself in order to open out into
the entire visible field; her bodily dwelling expands beyond all boundaries
(“l’habitacle corporel se dilate à l’infini”).
In sex, Catherine M. discovers a profound truth: lessness is the condi-
tion of allness. Finally, it seems to me significant that Catherine M., like
her double Catherine Millet, is an art critic. She sees very clearly (without
putting it exactly in these terms) that her sexual promiscuity transforms her
from a psychological subject into an aesthetic subject. Sex allows Catherine
M. to play a game with space (she speaks of opening and closing space) that
she also finds in the paintings of Barnett Newman, Yves Klein, and Alain
Jacquet. The aesthetic is not confined to works of art; sex can also be one of
the modalities of the aesthetic. Finally, if The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
also gives us the curious impression of being the document of a prolonged
ascetic exercise, it is undoubtedly because, as Catherine M. specifies, “to
have sexual relations and to feel desire were almost two separate activities.”
Sexual surrender can be experienced not as sensual gratification, but rather
as a discipline in anonymity, one that helps us to escape from what Lacan has
called “the hell of desire”—the hellish desire that is the sign, or perhaps we
should say the symptom, of our psychological individuality.
It may seem strange that I have chosen a heterosexual woman as the model
for what I have associated (especially in Homos) with homosexual desire: its
aptitude for transforming itself into “homoness.” The desiring individual is
erased in order to become a site of correspondences with the world. Accord-
ing to this argument, homosexuality finds its specificity when it is dissolved
as an identity. Thus my astonishment, and my disappointment, when I read
recent queer theory, which seems to be redefining itself as a new identitarian-
ism. In the sector of queer theory inspired by Sedgwick and the psychologism
she has promoted, the self, far from being challenged as a stable individual-
izing entity, is fortified as such an entity by identifying itself with the claims
of the ego. There is perhaps nothing surprising about this, given the central-
ity of the penis in gay male desire, and of the ease with which the penis can
be elevated (or degraded) into the phallus, the emblem of mastery and of a
hyperbolized ego. But let’s not lose all hope: a gay cinematographer, Pedro
Almodóvar, will give us a very agreeable lesson on the dephallicizing of the

penis, although this may involve, for him, the elimination of the desiring
homosexual subject.
E arly in Pedro Almodóvar’s 2000 film, All About My Mother, Esteban

(Eloy Azorín) and his mother, Manuela (Cecilia Roth), are sitting on
a couch having dinner and watching a dubbed version of Joseph Mankie-
wicz’s 1950 film All About Eve. Esteban, whose ambition is to be a writer,
and who has begun writing about his mother for a competition, complains
to Manuela that the Spanish version of Mankeiwicz’s title, Eva al desnudo,
is all wrong: the proper title, he claims, is Todo sobre Eva. Immediately after
this, we see Esteban beginning to write in his notebook what will presumably
be the title of the piece he has just referred to. He forms the word “Todo,”
and then the title of Almodóvar’s film appears on the screen for the first time,
in red and white block letters, in the space between the seated Esteban and
his mother.
What is interesting about Esteban’s correction is that it is picked up, as
it were, by Almodóvar. More exactly, Almodóvar has chosen to present his
choice of his own film’s title (and its possible source in the title of Mankie-
wicz’s film) as his copying of his character’s choice. The film has been with-
out a title for its first few minutes; it is only when Esteban writes “todo” as
the first word of his own composition that Todo sobre mi madre appears on
the screen as the title for Almodóvar’s finished film. The effect of this jux-
taposition is to encourage us to identify Almodóvar with Esteban, or rather
to identify the boy with a younger Almodóvar, an Almodóvar without ac-
complishments, with, for example, only a project for a piece of writing to be
called Todo sobre mi madre (and not a work finished more than thirty years
later in his—whose?—life, a film this time, with the same title).
The serious problem with this identification is that Almodóvar the writer
and filmmaker does away with Esteban a few minutes after the scene we
have been discussing. The boy is run over by a car on his seventeenth birth-
day (after attending, with his mother, a performance of A Streetcar Named
Desire), and what will interest us most about his mother will take place after
his death. Almodóvar and Esteban have important things in common: their
artistic vocation and their devotion to their mother. To say that is to suggest,
according to popular psychoanalytic wisdom, that they have something else
in common: homosexuality. Remember also that, at least in English, a gay
man might refer, perhaps ironically, to that “wisdom” by saying about the
origins of his homosexuality: “Of course, it’s all about my mother . . . ” Este-
ban, it’s true, is not portrayed as a homosexual; he is coded as one. As if his
artistic sensibility, his father’s absence, and his great love for his mother were
not enough, his aesthetic tastes leave no doubt, for a public even minimally
trained in such codes, about his gay sensibility: Bette Davis, Truman Capote,
and Blanche DuBois. We may begin to suspect that in plotting the death of
his young double, Almodóvar is also doing away, at least aesthetically, with
his—with their—homosexuality. The presumed gay sensibility does not,
however, disappear. A Streetcar Named Desire will play a major role in the
rest of the film, and Almodóvar appears to be at least as devoted to the great
campy actresses, and to his mother, as Esteban is (among those to whom
Almodóvar dedicates his film are actresses who play actresses—Bette Davis
is one of those mentioned—and Almodóvar’s mother).
There is also a dedication to men who act and become women, which
could be taken as a tender joke on poor Esteban. It more or less describes his
father, also named Esteban, about whom the boy knows nothing. He does,
however, very much want to know about his father, and Manuela promises,
a moment before he is struck down running after a taxi to get an autograph
from the actress he has just seen in the role of Blanche DuBois, to tell him
all when they return home later that evening. Curiously, Esteban’s homo-
sexuality is neither established nor denied; it is heavily coded, and ignored.
The identification between Almodóvar and Esteban has been made, the gay
sensibility has been, and will be, embraced, but homosexuality as a sexual
preference is irrelevant both to Esteban as a character in the film and, cor-
relatively, to Almodóvar’s identification with him. What is relevant to Este-
ban’s character is his obsessive curiosity about his father. It is as if the gay
coding were put into place as the perhaps secret logic of that curiosity and,
primarily, in order to be separated, liberated, from that curiosity. Esteban is
insistently anguished about the paternal gap in his life, a gap that has been
just as insistently maintained by Manuela. He begs her to talk to him about
his father and when, much later, she finds Esteban’s father in Barcelona,
she shows him passages from their son’s notebook in which Esteban had
expressed his grief at finding photos from Manuela’s youth from which half
of the image had been cut away. It was, he wrote, as if half of his own life
had been taken from him; to be whole, he needs that missing image, which
would mean knowing about his father. Almodóvar’s film may be “all about
my mother,” but the story his surrogate self wants to hear would be, and he
says exactly these words, “todo sobre mi padre.”
Almodóvar tells, and refuses to tell, that story. In a sense, the entire film is
a search for the father, at first on the part of Esteban, and then on the part of
Manuela, who leaves Madrid for Barcelona after Esteban’s death in order to
find his father and tell him about his son. But the story Almodóvar has to tell
about the father is a startling subversion of paternal identity. It is a story that
might have seriously compromised, even while satisfying, Esteban’s longing
for a father, and it ultimately dismisses whatever attributes—of power, of
justice, of legality—we might “normally” associate with the paternal func-
tion. It turns out that half of the missing half in Esteban’s life is identical
to the half he already knows. The young lovers Manuela and Esteban (the
father) had come from Argentina to Spain. Esteban left to work in Paris, and
returned to Barcelona as Lola two years later. He returned, more precisely,
half transsexualized, with his male genitals intact and with breasts larger
than his wife’s. It is with this partial copy of herself that Manuela conceived
her son. Unhappy with her more or less newly gendered mate—not, as far
as we can tell, because of his new anatomical makeup but rather because
of a persistent machismo that led him / her to run after other women while
forbidding Manuela to wear a miniskirt or a bikini on the beach—Manuela
had fled to Madrid early in her pregnancy without telling Lola that he / she
was soon to be a mother / father.
Back in Barcelona, Manuela eventually finds Lola, although she really
hasn’t spent much time searching for him / her. The Barcelona sequences
are about Manuela’s friendships with three other women. Soon after her
arrival, Manuela runs into Agrado (Antonia San Juan), a former truck driver
and friend from many years ago who, like Esteban, had had an incomplete
sex change in Paris that had allowed her to return to Barcelona as a prosti-
tute specializing in oral sex. Somewhat less sexually ambiguous is the great
actress Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), whose autograph the young Esteban
had been pursuing when he was killed and who is now playing Blanche in
Barcelona. Huma, who is having a troubled affair with the actress who plays
Stella (Candela Pena) in Streetcar, hires Manuela as her personal assistant,
and they become friends. Finally, Manuela takes in Rosa (Penelope Cruz), a
nun who, in the course of her social work with prostitutes, has been seduced
by Lola and is now carrying their child. In one of his conversations with Fré-
déric Strauss, Almodóvar remembers with affection an at once ordinary and
highly suggestive scene from his childhood: that of women in his provincial
village sitting together and talking. He has also said: “This vagueness, this
walking about, of the female characters [in his first feature film, Pepi, Luci,
Bom, and Other Girls on the Heap] interests me very much. Some one who is
alone, who doesn’t have any particular goal and who is always close to a state
of crisis, is exceptionally available, anything can happen to her, and she is

therefore an ideal character for telling a story [c’est donc un personnage idéal
pour raconter une histoire].” The phrasing is somewhat ambiguous: ideal as
the author of a story or as some one to tell stories about? Let’s read the remark
both ways; the essential point is that such women originate stories. Interest-
ingly, Almodóvar has a very non-Proustian reaction to the spectacle of people
speaking together, perhaps just far enough away so that he can’t hear them.
In Proust, such spectacles tend to set off paranoid mistrust: they must be
saying something unflattering about him, or at the very least something they
want to keep from him, a perhaps sinister secret. In Almodóvar’s response
to his ideal female character, the key word is availability (the person he de-
scribes is “dans une situation de grande disponibilité”). Like that character,
the women sitting together in his home town (in The Flower of My Secret,
Leo [Marisa Paredes] participates in such a scene when she returns to her
native village) are evoked as a promise. They are remembered not exactly for
the experience they have already shared, but rather for the impression they
give him of experience yet to be, of a prospective sociability.
What might that sociability be like? All About My Mother comes as close
as any of Almodóvar’s films to answering that question, although it does so
within a motivational structure that might have stifled any such project. Man-
uela returns to Barcelona in order to make those photographs whole again, to
put the father back in the picture in the only way now possible, which is to
give him a photo of his son. In other words, she returns in order to make the
family whole. To find the first Esteban would be to close a circle; Manuela
would be returning her son to his point of origin, and with that his—their—
story would be over. But of course the point of origin has already made a trip
outside the family circle—to Paris—and s / he returned from that trip with the
signs of a more radical crossing: transsexualized, s / he has traveled from one
sex to the other, although with each new seduction of women Lola makes an
at least temporary return to the Esteban still appended to her body.
Long before we know all that, the film has trained us to expect and to
enjoy diversified forms of traveling, of moving from one point to another.
Not only will there be all sorts of movements or crossings throughout the film
(from country to country, from city to city, from one sex to another, between
different sons, among different mothers); the repetition of the trans-motif
takes place within its first appearance. Rather than prefiguring the impor-
tance of the motif with just one version of it (the donation of Esteban’s heart),
Almodóvar juxtaposes three cases of the organ-transplant example. (The sec-
ond of the three is a theatrical rehearsal of an aspect of organ transplant
procedures.) Movement in All About My Mother will be inseparable from

repetition. The point of arrest along lines or circuits of movement between
places, psychic functions, or identities are not wholly heterogeneous; there is
also a certain persistence or continuity within the trajectories of mobility. But
it will be difficult to define both the content and mode of continuity. What
exactly is repeated when a theatrical character or situation reoccurs, differ-
ently, in reality—a reality which is of course itself the aesthetic construction
of Almodóvar’s film?
We are beginning to suspect that there may be a type of construction very
different from those constructed imperatives of desire, especially of sexual
obsession, that had given both psychic and structural consistency to some
of Almodovar’s earlier work. Violent death brings together the heterosexual
couple of Matador. Both Maria Cardenal (Assumpta Sema) and the retired
matador Diego Montes (Nacho Martínez) kill their sexual partners during
sex; the perfect sexual act, and the perfect act of violence, will be killing each
other as they reach orgasm together. The Law of Desire homosexualizes this
fantasy of sex and violence. Antonio (Antonio Banderas) becomes obsessively
attached to the film director Pablo Quintero (Eusebio Poncela) after having
with Pablo his first homosexual experience. Antonio kills the young man
Pablo loves and, after keeping the police at bay long enough to make love
once more with Pablo, he shoots himself. The Law Of Desire both centers
this obsessive sexuality and distances itself from it. The film opens with a
young man acting in a sequence from a porno film. He masturbates with his
back turned to us, his buttocks raised, repeating “Fuck me!” The words are
instructions given to him by two middle-aged men directing the scene, who
seem more turned on by it than the actor, who refuses to cry “Fuck me!” until
he is assured that no one will take up the invitation. Once the scene is over,
he picks up his money, with a more authentic expression of pleasure, from
the table next to the bed where the pseudo-action has taken place. Soon after
this we see Antonio alone in a toilet stall, voicing the same request but really
turned on by the prospect of its being satisfied. Pablo accommodates him
shortly thereafter in a scene whose nonpornographic realism is emphasized
by Antonio’s obvious discomfort as he is being penetrated for the first time.
The film moves toward its sexual seriousness; it’s as if that seriousness were
anticipated, and put into question, in a version of sex as pure construction.
We see it both as an unexciting construction for the porno actor and as an
exciting one for Antonio in the toilet stall before sexual demand becomes the
film’s deadly serious subject. The suggestion of desire as artifact is made even
stronger by the solipsistic nature of Pablo’s love for Juan (Miguel Molina). As
if he were writing a scenario for one of his films, Pablo sends himself letters
in which “Juan” tells him how much he loves him. Desire is construction,
and law. The porno sequence makes the connection very clear: the two older
men dictate—order—the scenario of mounting desire to the compliant (and
indifferent) actor. Antonio’s subsequent real excitement is just as constructed.
His excited demand to be fucked, delivered to no one and inspired by the
porno sequence he has just seen, can be addressed only to his own desire; it
formulates the laws of a desire he will then actualize with Pablo.
The laws of desire conceal its imaginary nature; they can perhaps be un-
done only if the being of the subjects to whom they are applied becomes
uncertain. The laws of desire will collapse with the disappearance of the
subjects of desire. In Almodóvar’s work, repetition, far from certifying the re-
ality of what is repeated, undermines the very category of the real (at the very
least, as a category to which the imaginary might be confidently opposed).
The relation between the imaginary and the real will be one of exchange,
not of opposition. Identities in All About My Mother are dissipated as they
are being repeated.
To whom does the “my” refer in the film’s title? Manuela begins her new
life in Barcelona by taking care of Agrado, who has been beaten up by one
of her tricks; she will take in Rosa and care for her during her pregnancy; her
job with Huma seems to consist mainly of watching over the drug-addicted
Nina; and she will become the new Esteban’s mother after Rosa’s death.
Manuela more or less becomes everyone’s mother (including other mothers:
Rosa and to a certain extent even Rosa’s mother), although it seems some-
what reductive of the richness of those relations to fit them all into a familiar
maternal mold. Furthermore, the original family model is kept intact—we
might even say protected—at the same time that Manuela is continuously
stepping outside that model. By insisting on the first son’s uniqueness, Alm-
odóvar reveals a reluctance merely to repeat the category of “the mother”
with different figures filling in for “my.” Manuela’s grief persists. And it per-
sists not only because young Esteban can never be simply replaced by anyone
else, but also because Manuela’s move into new relational modes requires a
certain mourning for the relationality left behind. Lola had already wrought
havoc with the myth of unambiguous family identities, but in fleeing from
him / her and in destroying his / her image on her photographs, Manuela has
worked to preserve that myth. Eliminated as a presence, paternal identity
and paternal prestige might be, and nearly were, permanently secured. The
security is, however, threatened by the same move designed to reconfirm it:
the search for the person who might fill the gap. In sobbing over the loss of
her son, Manuela also grieves over the loss of the principal guardian of the
paternal myth. And it is undoubtedly right that she should do so: to lose
the father’s absence, or the paternal function at once dependent upon and
incommensurable with any real father, is to lose the Law that governs and sta-
bilizes the attributing of identities. Manuela’s move outside the family circle
is, most profoundly, a dismissal of legitimating symbolic systems, an implicit
claim that social presence and social viability do not necessarily depend on
symbolic authorizations.
The symbolic cannot be seriously contested. The film does not, so to
speak, take on the paternal phallus directly; instead, it dismisses that constitu-
tively unlocatable fantasy product with numerous lighthearted evocations of
the penis. During their dinner in front of the TV screen, Esteban, responding
to his mother’s joke that he should eat more because he might have to keep
her one day, shocks her slightly by saying: “You don’t need pounds for that,
you need a big dick.” His point is confirmed by Agrado, whose credentials in
this matter are impeccable: she informs Nina that “clients like us pneumatic
[with, she explains, “a pair of tits as hard as newly inflated tires”] and well
hung.” It was apparently a wise move on Agrado’s part, given his / her inten-
tion of returning to Barcelona as a female prostitute, to keep his / her penis.
In fact, nearly everyone is turned on by her male appendage, not exactly
as an object of solemn desire, but as—what? Huma’s lover Nina tries to
feel Agrado’s breasts and, not seeming to expect much of a response, presses
her behind against Agrado’s crotch. When the good-looking and rather dim-
witted Mario (who is playing Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar) tells her that he
has been feeling tense and sweetly asks for oral sex, he also shows an interest
in her penis. Agrado, somewhat exasperated by all this highly focused at-
tention, asks Mario if men ask him to suck their cocks because he also has
one. And, during the wonderful sequence in Manuela’s apartment when she,
Rosa, Agrado and Huma improvise a party of drinks, ice cream, and talk, the
general good humor builds up to hilarity on the subject of the penis. Agrado
describes herself as “a model of discretion, even when I suck a cock,” to
which Huma responds: “It’s been ages since I sucked one.” Rosa the pregnant
nun, to the laughter of the others, cries out with mock naughtiness: “I love
the word cock—and prick!” as she joyfully bounces on the sofa. The penis
does, then, get a great deal of attention, which, far from highlighting its sex-
ual appeal, makes it an object of fun. Not exactly something to be made fun
of, but rather something to have fun with. Not quite neutralized, the penis
is, let’s say, naturalized. Unlike the absent father and the fantasmatic phallus,
the Almodovarian penis is present even where, in principle, it should not be:
on the bodies of such (at least self-proclaimed) women as Agrado and Lola.
The penis’s many reoccurrences help to dephallicize it. Lola’s penis, it’s true,
is at once an anomaly and a menace (she is, as Manuela says, not a person
but an epidemic), but she can scarcely be said to represent phallic power
and authority. And Agrado is anything but a phallic woman; rather, she em-
bodies the agreeable (as her name suggests) perspective on the penis as an
attractive object of sensual and social interest, detaching it from fixed ideas
of male and female identities. And it is perhaps this possibility of the penis
lending itself to a noncastrating detachment that accounts for its presence as
an enlivening, civilized and nonobsessive topic of interest—a passing topic
of interest—at the little party Almodóvar’s four women throw for themselves
in Manuela’s apartment.
All About My Mother invites and dismisses several serious attempts to get
an identification right. Who is the real mother? Who is the real child? Who is
the real woman? We are seduced into these questions mainly to be educated
in the techniques by which they may be ignored. Crucial to this double enter-
prise is the movement within the film between “reality” and art, and between
theater and film. One of the film’s several dedications is to actresses who play
actresses, and this includes not only the actresses Almodóvar mentions, but
also figures from his own film. Marisa Paredes, Cecilia Roth, and Candela
Pena all play actresses in All About My Mother. Paredes repeats herself, dif-
ferently, as Huma, who repeats herself as Blanche. Such repetitions place the
imaginary at the heart of the film’s realism: Huma playing Blanche reminds
us that Huma herself is a role, that she is both the actress playing such roles
as Blanche and a role being played by Paredes. Curiously, the scenes chosen
from All About Eve and especially A Streetcar Named Desire, as well as the
sequence of Huma rehearsing lines from Lorca’s Blood Wedding, assume
the status of the film’s narrative raw material, the already given texts which
“life” in All About My Mother mysteriously imitates. But it is of course not
quite a question of life imitating art, but rather of art (this film) imitating, or
repeating, art—although, because the film does distinguish what is meant
to be real from the film, the play, and the poem it inaccurately replicates,
Almodóvar is in fact constructing a much more interesting comment about
the tenuous nature of any such distinctions. He constructs, not derivations
(such as life from art), but rather exchanges within a vast realm of possibility.
Long after Manuela goes to Coruna in pursuit of her son’s heart, a scene from
Streetcar is performed in which a distraught Blanche searches for what she
calls her heart (which, Stella explains, is the heart-shaped case in which she
keeps her jewelry). It is a curious repetition: occurring long after the episode
it revives (although as part of a play written long before that episode, at once
preceding it and, as a text, contemporaneous with it), and vastly different in
its terms of reference (a jewel box rather than a son’s transplanted organ), it
nonetheless confirms the finitude and the formal unity of a linguistically des-
ignated world—a world made familiar, not by inherent attributes of being,
but by inevitable reoccurrences within our descriptions of it.
The fascination of such works as All About Eve and A Streetcar Named
Desire most probably derives from the skill with which they, like so many
other plays and films labeled as realistic, reformulate psychological fantasy as
a given, irrevocably realized world. Lacan has spoken of the defensive func-
tion of desire. The fantasy scenarios of desire are imperative constructions,
made imperative by the drives that must at all costs remain hidden. Desire’s
scenarios are fantasmatic fortresses, and their strength depends on the finality
of their plots, the strength with which they resist being potentialized. Desire
presents itself not only as a law but also as a fatality. Since desire constitu-
tively mistakes its object for its cause (this is the truth desiring fantasy hides
from us), the failure of those objects to satisfy desire is interpreted as a gap or
hole in the objects themselves. Lack is judged to be omnipresent: what desire
lacks is also missing in the world, not as something lost but, more tragically,
as something that was never, that never could be, in the world. This does not
mean that objects that might satisfy the repressed drives could ever be found
in the world. Those objects (the partial body-objects aggressively incorpo-
rated and expelled by infantile fantasies?) constitute by their very nature a
rejection of the real world. To satisfy the drives we must die to the world; the
“death instinct” pursues a fantasy-ecstasy given by fantasy-objects, and in so
doing it removes us from life itself. The death drive can be satisfied only by
the violence that annihilates it.
If these psychic depths have entered our discourse, it is thanks, most
notably, to Freud’s meta-psychological speculations, the identification by
Melanie Klein of the very being of the human subject with fantasy-objects,
and the line of reflection in Lacan that would lead him to assert not only
that “there is no sexual relation,” but also, perhaps even more radically, that
object-investment is something of a miracle. These are the great moments of
psychoanalysis, and, as Lacan never tired of proclaiming, they have nothing
to do with a supposed cure presumed to help us adapt more happily to reality.
The failure to adapt—which Freud traced in Civilization and Its Discontents
to the incomparable jouissance of a self-destructive and world-destructive
aggressiveness—constitutes the psychoanalytic subject. And it accounts for,
among other things, the perennially unsatisfied (and therefore productive)
nature of desire and the melancholy attached to what can only be the second-
ary, derived, and always misaimed scenarios of desire. If A Streetcar Named
Desire is such an important foil in All About My Mother against which the
Almodovarian world will be constructed, it is perhaps because Almodóvar
recognized in Williams’s play an ideally transparent version of the failures
and the melancholy inherent in desire. Blanche DuBois is a glamorously
pathetic caricature of the psychoanalytic subject’s absence from the world.
To say this, however, is also to say that the psychoanalytic subject, and
psychoanalysis, have little to say to us about possible exchanges with the
world (exchanges which would not be projections or incorporations or adap-
tive techniques). All About My Mother shows us such exchanges working out
of, and against, desire and its fantasies. More precisely, it implicitly makes
an argument for an aesthetic subject, one for whom a relationality that in-
cludes the real world (and not merely our fantasy-inscriptions on the world)
is born not from a dismissal of the real but rather from an elaboration of the
real as always in the process of being realized. By inaccurately replicating
them in his own film, Almodóvar appears to be suggesting that the characters
from Streetcar and All About Eve are insufficiently aestheticized. His many
repetitions—both intertextual and intratextual—are ways of reinitiating iden-
tities and situations rather than emphatically reconfirming them. As a result,
the film becomes a massive deconstruction of its title. “All About” is mere
epistemological fantasy. There is no single (or proprietary) subject to support
“My” (Esteban? which one? Rosa? Almodóvar?). and “Mother” has no clearly
identifiable referent (Almodóvar’s mother? What is the relation between the
mother of the title and the mother of the dedication? Can “mother” include
all the ways Manuela cares for others?) “Mother” is both present and already
lost everywhere; its presence is its lostness, the unlocatable and unsettled na-
ture of its referent and its attributes. Repeatable being—being that continu-
ously fails to be unique—creates a hospitable world of correspondences, one
in which relations, no longer blocked by difference, multiply as networks of
similitudes. It is as if the reappearance of identities were antecedent to their
realization; we could even say that nothing is ever even about to be because
imminence is always preempted by the power to persist inherent in purely
potential being.
Almodóvar’s aesthetic references in All About My Mother are to works that
are fantasmatically heavy and deficient in the imaginary. The movement in
the film between these works and the diegetically defined real is nonetheless
crucial to Almodóvar’s elaboration of the imaginary. They serve on the one
hand to make the important point that the imaginary as a mode of potential-
ized being is not to be restricted, and sequestered, within the category of

“art.” The retreat from being is not a particularity of the aesthetic narrowly
conceived; it is an ethical duty coextensive with life itself.
All About My Mother is a performative reflection on the possibility of a
nonfantasmatic imaginary. It proposes an answer to a question of great conse-
quence: how might the imaginary be separated from the defensive functions
of fantasy? Almodóvar’s very early films lightheartedly answer this question
without, as it were, taking the trouble to acknowledge its difficulty. All About
My Mother is of necessity less exuberantly wild than Pepi, Luci, Bom . . . and
Labyrinth of Passion: the exhilarating lightness of the imaginary is, in Alm-
odóvar’s more recent film, in frictional and possibly dangerous contact with
the seriousness of settled identities and established being. The threat comes
from two directions: from the rigid fantasy-structures of the very works that
seem to inspire Almodóvar’s version, in this film, of a nonfantasmatic imagi-
nary, and from the family structure that unravels even as Manuela awaits the
meeting that might consolidate it. Almodóvar’s nonfantasmatic imaginary
in All About My Mother seems to depend on the extinction of desire, an
extinction signaled by the absence of the father as the legislator of desire and
the death of the (author-)son as the possible subject of desire. Homosexual
desire is, however, obliquely referred to by nearly everyone’s very unsolemn
interest in the penis. The male organ, we have suggested, is naturalized. It is
by no means excluded as an erotic object, but it has become an erotic object
dephallicized and depsychologized, thereby at least raising the possibility of a
gay (and straight) desire for the male body that would no longer be burdened
by fantasy-illusions of power and castration. Furthermore, the dispersal and
repetition of identities in the film point to a solidarity or homo-ness of be-
ing, the partial reoccurrences of all subjects elsewhere. Identities are never
individual; homosexual desire would be the erotic expression of a homo-ness
that vastly exceeds it, a reaching out toward an other sameness.
Finally, the erasure of any relations at all between men in All About My
Mother clears the field for an extraordinary reworking of the absence of desire
for women. Far from being the more or less willing participants in a nonerotic
gay sociability, women are given the space not only to reinvent themselves,
but, more radically, to refashion relationality itself. Almodóvar’s women, un-
like those in the work of Tennessee Williams, are not fantasy-constructions
of a repressed, distorted, and vengeful heterosexual desire. Such elabora-
tions are undoubtedly—however reluctant many of us may be to agree with
this—one fate of heterosexual desire when, at least as far as conscious sexual
preferences go, it has been completely occluded by homosexual desire. It is
perhaps Almodóvar’s desexualizing and depsychologizing of homosexual-

ity that make possible a very different version of sexual indifference toward
women. In a discussion of All About My Mother with Frédéric Strauss,
Amodóvar has said: “ . . . the fact that a group of women are speaking to-
gether constitutes the basis of fiction, the origin of all stories.” But what sto-
ries will they tell? We take it as a sign of Almodóvar’s generosity that he does
not simply identify those fictions with his own stories about women. If his
work suggests that he is not quite sure what those stories will be, what forms
the talk will take, it may be because his talk, like everyone’s talk, can’t help
but be inspired and nourished by our culture’s richly significant narratives
of desire and psychic complexity. In a new relational regime, what will there
be to talk about? Almodovarian sociability is remarkably less constrained by
that richness than sociability usually is, but perhaps because he has come
very close to escaping from “the laws of desire,” he is all the more anxious
(eager—and a little worried?) about what exceeds them. There is, at any rate,
the exhilarating freshness of that modest party in Manuela’s apartment, and
there is the great and touching modesty of Almodóvar himself moving his
camera out of hearing range as Pepa and Marisa, who have not yet spoken
together, begin to converse on Pepa’s terrace at the end of Women on the
Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. As if his characters were about to speak of
things that he, Almodóvar, has not yet been able to imagine.
PART
2
Toward an Aesthetic Subject
6
Against Monogamy
Psychoanalytically speaking, monogamy is cognitively inconceivable and

morally indefensible.
This severe truth bears emphasis at a time when monogamy appears to
be enjoying—often in the most unexpected places—a new lease on life. In
the current celebration of family values in the United States, for example,
the value placed on monogamy and on the institution that (at least officially)
mandates it—marriage—by conservative religious groups was to be ex-
pected; somewhat more surprising is the conjugal furor manifested by many
individuals who, having often been more or less brutally excluded from the
comforts and reinforcements of family life, might have been expected to
continue marching under a Gidean banner defiantly proclaiming: Famille,
je vous hais! I refer to all those European and American gay men and lesbians
who have recently been demanding for homosexual couples legal rights and
benefits similar to those enjoyed by married heterosexual couples. I men-
tion this not to question the legitimacy of these demands (they are entirely
just demands), but rather to note that a community that has been at times
notorious in its embrace of sexual promiscuity has, during the past decade or
so, made an unprecedented attempt to persuade what is curiously called the
general population of the gay commitment to the ideal of the monogamous
couple. The AIDS epidemic can certainly be held partially accountable
for this rush to respectability, although, since we seem anxious to demon-
strate that we can be not only good husbands and wives but equally good
Originally published in Oxford Literary Review 20 (1998): 3–21.

a g a i n s t m o n o g a m y | 86
clergymen and soldiers, the drive behind the defense of monogamy can prob-
ably not be wholly explained as a private and public health strategy. Fou-
cault’s hope that gays might be in the vanguard of efforts to imagine what he
called “new ways of being together” appears, for a large number of gay people
today, to be considerably less inspiring than the hope that we will be allowed
fully to participate in the old ways of being and of coming together.
And yet, if the monogamous model seems more firmly established than
ever before as the hegemonic model of sexual relations, the very publicity it
has been enjoying suggests that its hegemony has been subjected to perhaps
unprecedented strains. It’s not simply the fragility attested to by such things as
high divorce rates, large numbers of single parents, and the surprisingly large
group of heterosexual men and women apparently untempted by married
life, although this surely accounts for much of the defensive praise of family
values. More interestingly, monogamy has become a subject of reflection—a
reflection that is a minor but crucial aspect of a more widespread problematiz-
ing of the nature and value of community, of the relation between community
and identity, and, most profoundly, of the nature of sociality itself. With the
fracturing of our world into frequently antagonistic communities—national,
racial, religious, ethnic, sexual—a troubled reflection about the relation
between community and identity (more exactly, about identity as commu-
nitarian) was perhaps inevitable. Identity-politics is far from dead. Indeed,
with the collapse of communism it practically defines our entire political
life. We know that, in practice, communism was inseparable from national-
ist ambitions; in its universal revolutionary aspirations, however, it was an
anti-identitarian ideology, a global social project independent of substantive
local identities. Those identities, as the hostilities in the former Yugoslavia
and among the republics of the former USSR dramatically illustrate, imme-
diately filled the void left by the collapse of communist regimes. To this must
be added the new confrontations in Western European nations between the
dominant groups and the vast numbers of political refugees and immigrant
workers from Eastern Europe or from Africa, and, in the United States, con-
frontations between established powers (generally white, male, heterosexual,
and Christian) and the various minority cultures demanding social spaces for
their communities, social recognition for their particular identities.
Such demands, it seems to me, can’t help but raise questions about their
premises. What relations exist, or should exist, between the various com-
munities in which we live, most notably between minority communities and
the dominant culture? Are communitarian identities necessary, or even de-
sirable? Does sociality depend on such identities? To what extent do antago-
nistic confrontations between different communities derive not merely from

particular historical and sociological conditions but, more profoundly, from
the very value attributed to communitarian identities? Doesn’t this valoriz-
ing of particular communitarian—and cultural—identities in turn privilege
difference over sameness in human relations, thus condemning the social to
repeated efforts to overcome the trauma of difference as well as to a depen-
dence on such weak cohesive virtues as a mere tolerance for diversity? Might
there, finally, be another way to think of the social, a view of relationality
as grounded in the extensibility of the human subject, that is, grounded in
sameness rather than in prejudicial hierarchies of difference? And might this
refiguring of the relational help us to elaborate modes of being-in-the-world
to which the concept of identity itself might be irrelevant?
In short, we are in a time of relational crisis, of a dangerous but also
potentially beneficial confusion about modes of connectedness, about the
ways in which who or what or how we are depend on how we connect. I will
be speaking primarily of social relationality, although it is also important
to address (as Ulysse Dutoit and I have begun to do in our recent work on
Caravaggio, Rothko, and Resnais) perceptual orders that design some of the
multitudinous relations between the human and the nonhuman. If there is
no moment at which human connectedness has not already been initiated,
we might nonetheless posit, largely for heuristic purposes, different plateaux
of relationality. The isolating of such plateaux implicitly sets up a structural
successiveness—from the simple to the complex, from spatial connections to
intersubjectivity—within the various orders of the relational. Such analytic
moves obviously have a certain artificiality since we live those orders simulta-
neously. They can, however, help us to redirect our relational attention; they
can serve as a cognitive prelude to what I will be putting forth as an ethical
imperative to readjust or to reorient our extensions. I will illustrate this by
examining what we might think of as a threshold between two relational
plateaux: that of the intimately conjoined couple (and this will return us to
the subject of monogamy) and that of the subject’s nonintimate connections
to the multitudinous points of disseminated sociality.
B ut why psychoanalysis? Psychoanalysis—and especially Freud—provides

the most significant account we have of how human beings initiate, sus-
tain, repudiate, and redirect affective and social ties with one another. Spe-
cifically, Freud’s work is a profound—and profoundly troubled—reflection
on the passage from the sociality of the couple to the sociality of the group.
In Freud’s thought, the prohibition of an incestuous monogamous passion
is given as the precondition of an exogamous monogamy later on. The little

boy, for example, renounces desire for one particular woman in order to de-
sire other particular women, and especially, in marriage, one other particular
woman. However, the Freudian description of the Oedipus complex—the
crucial moment of passage from the family to the social—provides some
reason to think of it as the structural occasion on which the child (male or
female) renounces an exclusive desire for any particular person.
Oedipal love is an ambiguous model for adult monogamy. In Chapter
III of The Ego and the Id, Freud complicates his theory of the “simple posi-
tive Oedipus complex in a boy” in ways that nearly destroy its descriptive
usefulness. It consists, most simply, in “an ambivalent attitude to [the boy’s]
father and an object relation of a solely affectionate kind to his mother”;
the necessary demolition of this complex involves the boy’s giving up his
object-cathexis of his mother and internalizing his rival-father as conscience,
or superego. This is the ‘normal’ outcome of the Oedipus complex, and it
both permits “the affectionate relation to the mother to be in a measure
retained” and “consolidate[s] the masculinity in a boy’s character.” But, first
of all, as Freud recognizes, this is not what we should have expected: he has
claimed a few pages earlier that when we are forced to abandon a love-object
we introduce it into the ego, identifying with it. Indeed, on the basis of this
more familiar psychoanalytic rule Jean Laplanche has argued that the posi-
tive Oedipus complex in a boy leads to homosexuality (he has internalized
the desired Oedipal mother and her desires), while the negative Oedipus
complex in a boy (in which the boy’s love for the father was the dominant
attachment) will lead to a heterosexual object choice modeled on the de-
sires of the father whom the heterosexual man has taken, permanently, into
himself. Freud himself doesn’t draw these conclusions; he simply notes, in
passing, that “this alternative outcome [of introducing the abandoned ob-
ject into the ego] may also occur,” although here identification, instead of
explaining how we manage to give up an object of love without really giving
it up, will depend, for both sexes, on “the relative strength of the masculine
and feminine sexual dispositions.” By identifying with the lost father object
instead of with the rival-mother, for example, the little girl will “bring her
masculinity into prominence.”
Now something quite new has entered the picture. Identification with
the parent of the other sex may not be the resolution of Oedipal rivalry (a
resolution that, drawing on the affectionate component of an original am-
bivalence toward that parent, also guarantees the continuing strength of the
rival’s prohibition by internalizing it) but may instead be largely due to our
constitutional bisexuality. Having mentioned this possibility, Freud imme-

diately goes on to give bisexuality a much more important role in Oedipal
desires. It suddenly benefits from a remarkable promotion: no longer simply
a factor that may, for example, explain a boy’s exceptional identification, in
the simple positive complex, with his mother instead of his father (the excep-
tional nature of which is, in any case, curious since it obeys, as we have seen,
the more general psychoanalytic law of identification with lost love-objects),
bisexuality now determines an Oedipal structure in which the simple positive
complex is nothing more than “a simplification or schematization” justi-
fied, “to be sure,” by “practical purposes.” Everyone lives both the positive
and the negative Oedipus complex. This means that in the little boy there
is one desiring subject that takes the mother as the primary object of love
and will end by identifying with a father originally (pre-Oedipally) loved
but then perceived as a rival, and another subject that desires the father and
will identify with the rival mother. Rather conveniently, “analytic experience
. . . shows that in a number of cases one or the other constituent disappears,
except for barely distinguishable traces.” Nonetheless, “at the dissolution of
the Oedipus complex the four trends of which it consists [both an object
relation and an identification with both parents] will group themselves in
such a way as to produce a father-identification and a mother-identification,”
and “the relative intensity of the two identifications in any individual will re-
flect the preponderance in him of one or other of the two sexual dispositions
[masculine and feminine].”
A lot has come to depend on those “two dispositions.” The stability of the
“official” end-point of each version of the Oedipus Complex depends on
the strength of the masculine or feminine disposition that determines which
parent—the rival or the love-object—the child will identify with. Sexual
preference depends not on whom we loved in our Oedipal drama, but on
whom we identified with, which may mean that there can be a homosexual or
a heterosexual consequence of both the “normal positive” and the “inverted
negative” complexes. Furthermore, the appeal to sexual disposition changes
the motivating force behind identifications. In the Oedipus complex, we
identify with the lost love-object only if we have the same sexual disposition
as that object. We become again that which we are already. This is particu-
larly surprising given Freud’s frequently reiterated skepticism about the valid-
ity of the masculinity-femininity distinction. Even in the passage I have been
discussing, he qualifies his confident statement that the little girl’s identifying
with her lost loved father “will clearly depend” on the strength of her mas-
culine disposition by adding: “whatever that may consist in.” And in the long
note to the final sentence of Chapter 4 in Civilization and Its Discontents,

Freud simultaneously reasserts the importance of bisexuality for psychoana-
lytic theory and acknowledges that sex “is hard to grasp psychologically.” We
may have thought that sex is exactly what psychoanalysis sets out to ‘grasp,’
but to the extent that understanding sex would mean understanding male-
ness and femaleness, psychology, unlike anatomy, Freud writes, cannot de-
fine those terms with any precision. “For psychology the contrast between the
sexes fades away into one between activity and passivity, in which we far too
readily identify activity with maleness and passivity with femaleness, a view
which is by no means universally confirmed in the animal kingdom.” Bi-
sexuality, a theory “surrounded by many obscurities,” is nonetheless brought
in to explain the most momentous consequences of the Oedipus complex.
The theory depends on the existence of sexual dispositions which, Freud
suggests, may be meaningless (or, at the very least, whose meaning we have
yet to grasp), and yet apparently nothing is more important than “the relative
strength of the masculine and feminine sexual dispositions” in each of us, in
the determination of our lifelong sexual identity.
The notion of bisexuality, which has been welcomed by many defenders
of psychoanalysis as proof that Freud himself disputed the claim that het-
erosexuality is more “natural” than homosexuality, is in reality a murky and
even somewhat treacherous concept, one that contravenes the very plurality
of desire it would appear to confirm. It is not only that bisexuality in Freud
is nothing more than heterosexuality doubled. Since, as Judith Butler has
pointed out, it is in desiring with his “femine disposition” that a boy sees his
father as an object of sexual love, bisexuality is simply “the coincidence of
two heterosexual desires [that of the masculine boy for his mother, that of the
feminine boy for his father] within a single psyche.” Even more: bisexuality
doubles the Oedipal couple, making of the very agent that disrupts copula-
tive intimacy the occasion for repeating that intimacy. Indeed, its function as
a concept may be to account for that repetition by disguising it. A presumably
natural, and universal, bisexual disposition would be somehow more accept-
able, more respectable, than the child’s efforts to stay within the family on
any terms, and to do so by initiating an intimate relation of desire with the
very parent trying to break up such a relation. To see the child’s so-called
bisexual impulses as his or her most refined strategy for remaining within
the family would be for Freud to acknowledge his own reluctance to imag-
ine how we ever move beyond familial desires, his reluctance to imagine
that move within the very situation—the Oedipus complex—which psycho-
analysis proposes as an account, precisely, of how we become social beings

and not merely familial beings.
An authentic breaking away from the family within psychoanalysis’s own
account of the Oedipus complex does, however, take place; it is enabled by
the multiple partners necessitated by the child’s so-called bisexuality. This is
a less acceptable exit from Oedipal ties than the father’s—the Law’s—terri-
fying prohibitions, for it suggests that post-Oedipal desire may owe very little
to the structures of Oedipal family desires, and any such failure to preserve
and repeat those desires—I will return to this—is what Freud is incapable
of entertaining and of conceptualizing, even when he has himself provided
the material for such conceptualizing. The Oedipal situation, as Freud de-
scribes it, is, after all, an agitated movement among various couples: the
male child with the beloved mother, the male child with the father who
must be internalized as Law, the feminine male child with the loved father,
the feminine male child with the rival mother. The Oedipal triangle is a
misnomer; it always contains at least four people, and this doesn’t even take
into account the shifts in the parents’ identities as a result of the shifting
sexual dispositions—masculine and feminine—that model the child’s rela-
tions to them. There are not only the masculine boy and feminine boy; there
are also the desired father and the law-giving father, as well as the desired
mother and the threatening mother, which gives us six Oedipal identies. In
a famous letter to Fliess, Freud wrote: “Bisexuality! I am sure you are right
about it. And I am accustoming myself to regarding every sexual act as an
event between four individuals.” By this he presumably meant that in het-
erosexual intimacy, there is a repetition of the bisexuality already governing
Oedipal relations—that is, a fantasmatic desiring woman within the man
and a fantasmatic desiring man within the woman. But since this creates, for
the man, a male partner instead of a female partner, and, for the woman, a
female partner instead of a male partner, we need two more shadow partners
for the bisexual scenario. (It’s true that a certain economy of identities might
be managed by superimposing the fantasy man created in the woman by
the real man’s homosexuality [that is, according to Freud, his feminine self]
on the woman’s masculine [or, again according to Freud, homosexual] self,
since both these fantasy figures are males desiring females. The verification
of any such economy of fantasmatic moves is, to say the least, somewhat
problematic . . . ) Furthermore, to the extent that our sexual behaviour always
includes a motivating memory of our Oedipal fantasies of sexual intimacy
(includes, that is, the memory of a presence summoning us away from that
intimacy), each partner sees the other not only as two desired objects (male
and female) but also as two possibilities of interdiction and identification.
With ten figures, the “memory” of the Oedipal triangle in our adult inti-
macies becomes a fantasmatic orgy. This is, it could of course be argued, a
reductio ad absurdum of what Freud himself characterizes as object choices
and identifications so complex as to make it nearly impossible “to describe
them intelligibly.” Our fantasy calculus does, however, have the advantage of
highlighting the instability of the psychoanalytically conceived couple. The
fantasy-relation that would be the most important antecedent for the adult
drive toward monogamy—the phallic drive toward the Oedipal parent—
turns out to have been but one in a whirlwind of desiring mobility. Monog-
amy disciplines the orgies of childhood. In constantly renewing our fidelity
to that early loved object, we just as constantly betray the polygamous condi-
tions in which we loved it. If it is true that bisexuality in Freud perversely
reinforces the heterosexual couple, it also institutes a mobility of desiring
positions and a multiplicity of identities that make of the couple itself a unit
in continuous dissolution. Psychoanalytically, monogamy is inconceivable
except as something that blocks circuits of desire. A particular couple with
particular identities begins to be traced when one relational line holds us
with what is probably a paranoid fascination—when the desired other has
become what Jean Laplanche calls an enigmatic signifier imagined to be in
possession of, and to be wilfully withholding, the secret of our being. Mo-
nogamy perhaps thrives on this at once narcissistic and paranoid fascination
with the secrets of the other as our secrets. Monogamy is nourished by an
impoverished narcissism; it is the arrested deployment of desire’s appetites
and curiosities.
F rom Freud to Lacan, psychoanalytic therapy has been vastly more con-
servative than psychoanalytic theory. While thrillingly dismantling re-
ceived psychoanalytic wisdom about, most notably, castration, the ego, the
death instinct, and the very possibility of that which appeared to be the psy-
choanalytic object par excellence: a sexual relation, the most radical theorists
have for the most part remained remarkably silent—or at best vague and
inconclusive—about the relevance of their theoretical subversions to a pos-
sible questioning of the couple—especially, but by no means only, the het-
erosexual couple—as a normative model for psychoanalytic therapy. Given
this disjunction between sexual theory and sexual politics, it is hardly surpris-
ing that psychoanalysts, from Freud to the present, have been somewhat in-
coherent not only about the social function and value of monogamy but even
about its psychic genealogy, about precisely those continuities between

childhood and adult life that have for the most part been psychoanalysis’
self-defined specialty. Freud, for example, while never treating the topic ex-
haustively, touches upon it in a series of comments that make for anything
but a unified point of view. The remark in the Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality to the effect that in finding a love object we are refinding it appears
to ground monogamous impulse in the memory of an infinitely satisfying (if
only in fantasy) infantile relation to the mother. From this perspective, mo-
nogamy would be a relation indifferent, even hostile, to the needs of larger
social orders. Indeed, in Civilization and Its Discontents, libidinal bonds unit-
ing a couple contribute to the antagonism between civilization and sexuality.
Civilization uses “every means” to bind “the members of the community
together in a libidinal way,” an aim that sexual love between two individuals
resists. “A pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves, and do not even need
the child they have in common to make them happy”; a love-relationship
at its height leaves “no room . . . for any interest in the environment.” Four
pages earlier, however, such love-relationships, institutionalized in marriage,
are just what society requires in order to rein in our naturally promiscuous
bent. It is a kind of concession to the antisocial drive toward sexual plea-
sure: “Present-day civilization makes it plain that it will only permit sexual
relationships on the basis of a solitary, indissoluble bond between one man
and one woman, and that it does not like sexuality as a source of pleasure
in its own right and is only prepared to tolerate it because there is so far no
substitute for it as a means of propagating the human race.” An even more
disabused interpretation of monogamy is suggested in the passing remark, in
the 1918 piece on “The Taboo of Virginity,” that “the right to exclusive pos-
session of a woman . . . forms the essence of monogamy.” Far from having
profound roots in the history of each individual’s sexuality, monogamy would
be the intimate arrangement most consistent with the more general social
right to private property.
An analogous interpretive mobility can be found in Adam Phillips’s re-
flections on the subject in his recent book, Monogamy. The couple, Phillips
writes, is “home”: “Because we begin our lives in a couple, and are born of
a couple, when we talk about couples we are telling the story of our lives.”
And: “Our survival at the very beginning of our lives involves us in something
like monogamy.” “The stuff of which monogamy will be made” are the “in-
klings” the child has, in relation to his or her mother, “of privilege and pri-
vacy, of ownership and belonging.” And yet, “One of the most striking things
about reading stories to young children is the ruthless promiscuity of their
attention.” Children’s “curiosity is not monogamous. It ranges.” In growing

up, we lose, Phillips writes in one of his most striking formulas, “the primitive
art of losing interest in things or people”—and that art may be “the best thing
we can learn from children.” On the one hand, a revival of the form of our
first passion; on the other, a betrayal of the healthy promiscuity of childhood
desire. (We might think of this promiscuous curiosity as a socialized version
of Freud’s scenario of mobile Oedipal desires.) Finally, the psychoanalyst
Christopher Bollas expresses most forcefully the view of monogamy—and of
marriage—as a regression to infantile securities. In the chapter “Why Oedi-
pus?” from the 1992 Being a Character, Bollas writes that we need to retreat
from both the anguishing “complexity born of having a mind to oneself” as
well as from “the distresses of group life” which, with its competing points
of view that never cohere into a unified social identity, “often operates ac-
cording to psychotic principles.” In order to survive both within groups and
within our individual consciousness, we regress, and this regression “has been
so essential to human life that it has become an unanalyzed convention, part
of the religion of everyday life. We call this regression ‘marriage’ or ‘partner-
ship,’ in which the person becomes part of a mutually interdependent couple
that evokes and sustains the bodies of the mother and the father, the warmth
of the pre-Oedipal vision of life, before the solitary recognition of subjectivity
grips the child.” Thus monogamy, for Freud, Phillips, and Bollas, turns out to
be nearly all things: a civilized necessity that represses desire and betrays the
promiscuous curiosity of childhood, a self-sufficient arrangement that, on its
own, would never open out into community life and is therefore threatening
to civilization, a denial of the mobility inherent in what was only superficially
monogamous desire during the Oedipal stage, and a retreat to the comforting
immobility of childhood ties and away from the multitudinous and wildly
scattered “subjectivities competing for selfhood” in both mature conscious-
ness and social groups.
The psychoanalytic content of the Oedipus Complex (incestuous desire,
parricidal impulses, the derivation of a superego from parental authority, bi-
sexuality) distorts a much simpler and, I believe, more consequential drama
to which the identity and the sex of the agents are irrelevant. The major
function of the figure Freud speaks of as the rival father is not to be either a
sexual rival or a parent, but rather to redirect the child’s attention, to suggest
that there are other modes of extension into the world. It doesn’t matter if the
agent doing that is a real father in the traditional nuclear family, or another
woman, or indeed another man when the desired adult is also a man or,
finally, the several agents that may compete for the child’s interest, redirect
its curiosity, in the single-parent family. The crucial thing is to get the child
out of the family, although such a reading may appear to be forestalled by
Freud’s relegating of that function to the father.
Sophocles’ tragedy points less ambiguously to this reading of the Oedipal
myth than Freud’s appropriation of it. First of all, Oedipus Rex is not about
Oedipal desires. There is no evidence that Oedipus, having killed his father
and married his mother, has fantasies of incest and parricide, whereas the
psychoanalytic version of the myth is about nothing if not the determinant
role in our psychic lives of incestuous and parricidal fantasies. What Oedipus
comes to realize in Sophocles’ play is the failure of efforts to remove him
from the site of Oedipal fantasies, of the Oedipus complex. After hearing
the oracle’s prophecy of Laius’s death at the hands of their son, Laius and
Jocasta literally throw the child into the world, hoping he will die on the
“barren, trackless mountains” on which a servant is ordered to abandon him.
But thanks to the good—or bad—services of another shepherd, Oedipus
is taken in by another family, this time the royal family of Corinth. When
he himself hears Apollo cry to him that he will kill his father and couple
with his mother he flees his adoptive home and, as everyone knows, after
his murderous encounter with Laius lands right back in his real home. Oe-
dipus is catapulted from home to home—as if there were no way to escape
from the terrible intimacies of the Oedipal family. The play does, however,
recognize the urgency (as well as the tragic futility) of the attempted escape;
it projects a defeated dream of pure, orphaned being in the world. But it
also represents this being-in-the-world as a violent fate: the probable death
of the child abandoned in nature, the extraordinary violence of Oedipus’s
encounter with Laius and his retinue (he kills all of them). It is at a meeting
of three roads that the three lives of son, mother and father begin tragically
to intersect. Not only does Oedipus leave home only to circle back to it; the
father moves in the world as a familial menace, guaranteeing that whatever
the son finds in the world will be, as Freud might say, a refinding of scenes
and structures from home.
And yet there is an ambiguity about the father’s “place” in both Sophocles
and Freud. In Oedipus Rex he is met after all out there, and the event of his
murder—and especially the murder of those accompanying him—exceeds
the prophecy of parricide. In Freud, the father’s prohibition at once tears
the child away from a familial intimacy and guarantees the permanent fan-
tasmatic repetition of that intimacy. The crucial factor here is identifica-
tion. On the one hand, the child’s identifying with the father is a kind of
internal monumentalizing of the most violent sides of the Oedipal conflict.
Unable to satisfy the revengeful aggressiveness toward the parent who thwarts
its desire to have the other parent all to itself, the child, as Freud writes in
Civilization and Its Discontents, “takes the unattackable authority into him-
self” where it both continues to play the father’s threateningly prohibitive
role and, very conveniently, can also be the defenseless object of the child’s
aggressiveness toward it. In this version of things, the Oedipus complex, far
from being dissolved, is repressed, which means that it will be symptomati-
cally repeated throughout the subject’s life. As Freud also says in Civilization
and Its Discontents, when human families expand into human communities,
they repeat, in intensified form, the conflicts and the guilt of the past. “What
began in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group.” What
we “re-find” in the erotic attachments of adult life are not only the warmth
of pre-Oedipal intimacy but also the desires, the furious aggressiveness and
the ineradicable guilt of the Oedipus complex.
But let’s suppose that identification can be something quite different,
that it can truly dissolve the fixity of Oedipal desires that are, paradoxically,
at once monogamous and promiscuous. It can do this, I think, only if the
child identifies with the other as himself. It is as if Freud obscurely realized
this by making the exception, for the Oedipus complex, to his rule that we
internalize lost love-objects. That is, it is as if he realized that at issue in
the Oedipus complex is not how we preserve a relation to those objects,
but rather, whether we will successfully, and with pleasure, move from away
from, abandon love-objects. This can be done only if the rival father, or the
rival mother, for both the little boy and the little girl, is no longer seen either
as a rival or as a parent, but rather as a seductive summons. He or she intrudes
upon familial intimacy with a promise (and not merely the prohibitive threat
Freud emphasizes)—the promise that if the child leaves the family it will
have the narcissistic pleasure of finding itself in the world.
From this perspective, the privileged position Freud gives to the so-called
positive Oedipus complex can be understood, and justified, not because it is
the structure that holds forth the prospect of a heterosexual resolution, but
rather because it is the structure in which narcissistic identification with the
other can best take place. And this is because within this structure, the other,
the one disrupting the erotic Oedipal couple, is the parent of the same sex
as the child. An alien world best exercises its seduction when it appears with
the familiar aspect of sameness. It is true that here I am giving a great deal of
importance to sexual difference and sameness as phenomenological indexes
of all sameness and difference, a move for which queer theorists have sharply
criticized our heterosexist (and psychoanalytically inspired) culture. I would
forestall any such criticism of what I’m now proposing by pointing out that
we are speaking of that particular moment in development when, as Bollas
has put it, “in the course of ‘answering’ questions about the origins of their
body’s genital urges, [children] discover with what sex they are identified,
therefore with what parent they are identified, and they realize their lineage.”
Bollas speaks of “a new psychic structure” arising out of the new libidinal
position of “genital primacy.” It is the self corresponding to this repositioning
of bodily intensities that naturally sees in sexual difference the phenomenol-
ogy of all difference, and this limited (even distorted) view of sameness and
difference is immensely helpful in guiding the child away from the anxieties
of Oedipal intimacy to what might otherwise be seen as a dangerous move
away from home.
B ut the guiding away can be successful only if something is truly lost, or

forgotten, and here we confront both a necessity and an opportunity
alien to psychoanalytic thought. But what exactly is psychoanalytic thought,
and how might answering this question help us to define what might be
called the psychoanalytically constituted subject? One of the most curious
aspects of Civilization and Its Discontents is Freud’s reiterated self-reproach
to the effect that he is not speaking psychoanalytically. The work was writ-
ten in 1929, late in Freud’s career, so it’s not as if he hadn’t had time to de-
velop a distinctively psychoanalytic language. You would think that by now
Freud would be “speaking psychoanalysis” fluently. But the complaints start
in Chapter 3, where he laments that “so far we have discovered nothing that
is not universally known,” nothing, that is, that might not have been said
without the help of psychoanalysis. Given the repetition of this complaint
three more times in the work, we should be alert to anything that breaks the
self-critical trend, to any moment when Freud might be saying: “This is it!
Now I’m being profound, saying things that people didn’t know before I said
them! Now I’m speaking the language of psychoanalysis!” And indeed there
is just such a moment. In the middle of Chapter 7, Freud announces an idea
worthy of the founder of a new science, a new way of thinking about the
human mind. “And here at last an idea comes in which belongs entirely to
psychoanalysis and which is foreign to people’s ordinary way of thinking.”
What is that idea? It tells us, Freud continues, that while “conscience is
indeed the cause of instinctual renunciation to begin with . . . later the rela-
tionship is reversed. Every renunciation of instinct now becomes a dynamic
source of conscience and every fresh renunciation increases the latter’s se-
verity and intolerance.” And Freud declares himself “tempted to defend the
paradoxical statement that conscience is the result [rather than the cause]
of instinctual renunciation.” It would seem, then, that paradox is central
to psychoanalytic thinking. There is, however, something troubling in the
fact that Civilization and Its Discontents has been dealing in paradoxes long
before Freud announced the arrival of an idea worthy of psychoanalysis. We
have learned, for example, that the more virtuous a man is the more severe
is his superego, and that he blames himself for misfortunes for which he is
clearly not responsible. Such paradoxes may be at first puzzling, but they are
resolvable. To renounce instinctual satisfaction is not to renounce instinctual
desire; the frustration of desire increases its intensity, and so saints, Freud
remarks, “are not so wrong” to call themselves sinners: frustrated temptations
are inescapable temptations.
Freud moves on, however, to say something quite different: renunciation
itself produces conscience. The more familiar view, Freud himself reminds
us, is that “the original aggressiveness of conscience is a continuance of
the severity of the external authority and therefore has nothing to do with
renunciation.” But internalization turns out to have two very different as-
pects. On the one hand, the authority becomes an internal watch-dog and is
thereby able to continue to exercise its prohibitive functions. On the other
hand, Freud tells us, it is internalized in order to be attacked. The authority’s
imagined aggression toward the desiring subject is taken over by the subject,
not only to discipline desire but in order to attack the authority itself. The
subject-ego is being punished for its guilty desires, but the punishing energy
is taken from the subject’s fury at the agent of punishment, who in fact also
becomes its object. The child is showing the father what a good punishing
father he, the child, would be, but since it is aggression toward the father
which allows for this instructive demonstration, the object of it is bound to
be the father, “degraded,” as Freud says, to sitting in for or as the child in the
punished ego. This ferociously severe conscience enacts the phenomenol-
ogy of the renounced instinctual drives. We no longer have the paradox of
virtue intensifying the reproaches of conscience, a paradox explained, and
dissolved, by the role of secret desires compensating for the renounced be-
havior. Now we are not speaking of degrees of guilt or of moral severity but
rather of an aggressiveness that accompanies renounced desires. The exter-
nal authority’s severe demands on the subject are, as it were, fused with the
subject’s vengeful anger at those demands, both of which constitute the sub-
ject’s renunciation: the consequence, and the content, of renunciation are a
doubly reinforced conscience.
This idea may be called distinctively psychoanalytic in that it describes a

process in which the world has been sacrificed but nothing has been lost. The
external authority now exists only as a function of the subject’s fantasies: both
as the reappropriated angry father originally projected onto the real father
and as a carrier of the subject’s revengeful aggressiveness toward the father.
Psychoanalysis does not deny the world’s existence, but it does document the
procedures by which the mind dephenomenalizes the world, freezes it in a
history of fantasmatic representations, or persistently resists the world with
its fantasy of lost jouissance. To complain, for example, as critics have done,
that Freud turned away from the real world and studied the seduction of
children only as fantasy is like complaining about astronomers turning their
analytic attention to the stars. Psychoanalysts are no more and no less capable
than anyone else of recognizing such phenomena as real child abuse, but
that recognition is irrelevant to what is ‘psychoanalytic’ in psychoanalysis. In
fact psychoanalysis is hyperbolically aware of the world as different from the
self—which is why it can so brilliantly describe all our techniques for erasing
that difference, and why it is of so little help in constructing an epistemology
and an ethics grounded in perceptions of sameness, an epistemology and an
ethics that might allow us to build a nonviolent relation to the real.
In psychoanalysis, nothing is ever forgotten, given up, left behind. In
Chapter 1 of Civilization and Its Discontents Freud claims that “in mental life
nothing which has once been formed can perish,” and, soon after this, “ev-
erything past is preserved.” Everything persists; psychoanalysis classifies the
modalities of persistence and return: conscious memory, slips-of-the-tongue,
repression, symptomatic behavior, acting out, sublimation. Civilization and
Its Discontents textually confirms this law. It wanders, and Freud appears to
have trouble finding his subject (the function of religion, the conditions of
happiness, the nature of civilization, erotic and nonerotic drives, the etiology
of conscience.) And yet aggressiveness comes to include everything: it is ac-
companied by an intense erotic pleasure; like the oceanic feeeling discussed
in Chapter 1, it breaks down the boundaries between the self and the world;
it gives expression both to instinctual needs and, in the form of conscience,
to the inhibiting energy of civilization. With the analysis of aggressiveness,
the boundaries separating concepts are broken down; manifesting a kind of
oceanic textuality, ideas flood together in a dense psychoanalytic mix that
obliterates such cherished distinctions as those between Eros and nonerotic
aggression, even between the individual and civilization (both are at once
objects and sources of aggression.)
Distinctions between ideas are perhaps grounded in assumptions of a

difference of being between the self and the world. In demonstrating the
mind’s resources for erasing that distinction, psychoanalysis understandably
has difficulty articulating its concepts, keeping some space between them.
For Freud, this meant holding on, for dear intellectual life, to dualisms he
himself recognised as fragile. Their terms may constantly be collapsing into
one another—sadism into masochism, the nonerotic into the erotic, even,
as Jean Laplanche has demonstrated, the death drive into sexuality—and yet
Freud continued to insist, to insist all the more tenaciously, on the validity of
his dualisms. “Our views,” he writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “have
from the very first been dualistic, and today they are even more definitely
dualistic than before.” The logical incoherence that results from the break-
down of conceptual distinctions accurately represents the overdetermined
mind described by psychoanalysis. For over-determination, far from being
merely a characteristic of primary process thinking, defines the psychoana-
lytic mind—that is, the mind that has renounced none of its interpretations
of the real.
This also is an oceanic phenomenon—not exactly, however, the “limitless
narcissism” of the self everywhere present in the world, but rather that of the
world entirely reformulated as the self. The distinction, which may appear
tenuous, is actually of the greatest importance, for what I take to be to be
psychoanalysis’s most serious limitation is precisely the difficulty it has imag-
ining that we can find ourselves already in the world—there not as a result
of our projections but as a sign of the natural extensibility of all being. This
is the presence to which art—not psychoanalysis—alerts us. I have recently
been interested—especially in the work done with Ulysse Dutoit—in tracing
the communication of forms in art as the affirmation of a certain solidarity in
the universe, a solidarity we must perhaps first of all see not as one of identi-
ties but rather of positionings and configurations in space. The narcissistic
pleasure of reaching toward our own ‘form’ elsewhere has little to do with the
flood of an oceanic, limitless narcissism intent on elimating the world’s differ-
ence. Rather, it pleasurably confirms that we are inaccurately replicated ev-
erywhere, a perception that may help us, ultimately, to see difference not as
a trauma to be overcome but as the nonthreatening supplement to sameness.
Psychoanalysis profoundly describes our aptitude for preserving the world
as subjectivity. Even the metonymic excesses of desire in Lacan are not the
result of self-accretion through what might be called the accurate perception
of inaccurate self-replications. Rather, Lacanian desire’s excess is a function
of misregonition; constantly confusing the objects of our desires with their
cause, we multiply desires in a hopeless effort to rejoin a retroactively fanta-

sised lost “true” object of desire—thus remaining faithful, in an even more
desperate version of fidelity to the past than the more literal Freudian one, to
a lost nothingness. Art gives us a model of the world as world, one we ‘know’
as aesthetic subjects thrown outwards, ‘defined’ by relations that at once dis-
solve, disperse and repeat us.
We move by forgetting—and no human faculty is more alien to psycho-
analysis than that of forgetting. Freud initiated the systematic study of all the
ways in which we remain faithful, the strategies by which we manage to go
on loving and fearing our first fantasmatic objects. Psychoanalysis, with its
obsessive concern with the difference between the self and the world, neces-
sarily sees the latter as the repository of everything hostile to the self. It is a
place to which, at best, we adapt and from which we retreat and regress to
the imagined familial securities nourished by such privileged institutions as
monogamy and marriage. The family is the psychoanalytic haven to which
we regress, a regression that might be unnecessary if we had left it in the
first place. If psychoanalysis, in its account of the extraordinary mobility of
childhood and, more specifically, even Oedipal desires, has itself described
for us the original inconceivability of a monogamous fixity of desire, and
therefore of a stable sexual identity, monogamy nonetheless is the relational
figure most congenial to what we might call the psychoanalytic fidelity of
the self to the self, its indifference to signs of self that are not signs of inter-
pretation, and, finally, its profoundly immoral rejection of our promiscuous
humanity.
7
Sociality and Sexuality
Nothing, it would seem, is more difficult than to conceive, to elaborate, and

to put into practice “new relational modes.” Foucault used this expression to
define what he thought of as our most urgent ethical project, one in which
gays, according to him, were destined to play a privileged role. Indeed, in
an interview published in 1981 in the French magazine Gai pied, he went
so far as to argue—against what we might call psychoanalytic common
sense—that what disturbs people about homosexuality is not “the sexual act
itself” but rather “the homosexual mode of life,” which Foucault associated
with “the formation of new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen
lines of force.” Such alliances, such lines of force would somehow escape
“the two readymade formulas”—both perfectly consistent with the normal-
izing coercions of the dominant culture—“of the pure sexual encounter and
the lovers’ fusion of identities.” But we should remember that the “new ways
of being together”—which, apparently, neither genital nor psychic intimacy
would help us to imagine—are for the most part as yet “unforeseen.” Fou-
cault seems to have thought of cultural subversion and renewal as inherent
in homosexuality, but, to a large extent, it is also something not yet realized.
Homosexuality “is not a form of desire but something desirable. Therefore,”
he went on, “we have to work at becoming homosexuals.” In so doing, we
might, curiously and impressively, help to bring heterosexuals closer to what
Foucault also called “a manner of being that is still improbable.” “Homo-
sexuality is a historic occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities
Originally published in Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 641–56.

s o c i a l i t y a n d s e x ua l i t y | 103
not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because
the ‘slantwise’ position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines he can lay
out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light.”1
I want to suggest that in order to imagine “a mode of life” that would, as
Foucault put it, “yield a culture and an ethics” we might momentarily bracket
some of the work that has been done in recent years and respond as if we
had just heard Foucault’s challenge for the first time.2 Let’s start again, which
means taking a foundational approach to the question of relationality. Our
thinking about new ways of being together has been predominantly reactive,
against established relational modes. Thus the criticism of hierarchical rela-
tional structures—that posit difference in terms of superiority and inferiority,
of dominant groups and oppressed groups—has led not to a questioning of
the prioritizing of difference itself as a foundational relational structure but
rather to praiseworthy but somewhat ineffective pleas for the respect of dif-
ference and diversity. Predictably, the strongest work done so far has been
critical histories of hegemonies, histories that also frequently propose certain
transgressive reversals or antithetical reformulations of hegemonic categories.
In Homos, I contrasted this with an admittedly utopic form of revolt—one
I located principally in Genet—that would seek to escape transgressive re-
lationality itself and might contest given categories and values by failing to
relate to them either adaptively or transgressively. But how do we get to such
a “place”? I would like to move back from Genet’s confident performance
of antirelationality in Funeral Rites and hypothesize a genealogy of the rela-
tional, more specifically, a certain threshold of entry into the relational. I am
of course not referring to a historically locatable moment, one at which each
human subject—and not only human subjects—might have the option of
not moving, of not connecting. Such beginnings are both inexistent—there
was never any moment when we were not already in relation—and structur-
ally necessary: it is perhaps only by positing them that we can make existent
relations intelligible. Or, more exactly, it is only through the figuration of
such beginnings that we can see the being of relations, a being that at once
grounds and is obscured by the complicated contingency of all relations.
This is the enabling assumption of much of Beckett’s fiction—of Company,
for example, in which a life that is nearly over remembers itself essentially
by remembering (which is to say, by inventing) its relational origins. The
1. Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” interview by R. de Ceccaty, J. Danet, and J. Le

Bitoux, trans. John Johnston, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, vol. 1 of The Essential Works of Foucault,
ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1997), pp. 136, 137, 138.
2. Ibid, p. 138.
Beckettian narrator goes back to a place where he never was as the only
way to account for his being anywhere, for it was from “there” that he was
summoned into relations, called up from the immobility of perfect self-
adequation to be displaced within a language that, before meaning anything,
operates as a directional motor, an agent of spatial dispersion.
Because the representation of the birth of relations requires a figure
of nonrelationality, the danger inherent in any such representation is the
erasure of figurality itself. Nothing is more haunting in the work of artists
otherwise so different from one another as Turner and Rothko than their
reduction of the canvas to the wholly undifferentiated origins of the can-
vas’s work. In the nearly unpunctuated whiteness of Turner’s late paintings,
in the blankets of dark sameness on the panels of the Rothko Chapel in
Houston, we come as close as we can to suffering the truly rare privilege
of seeing nothing—as if the lines of movement in space that art represents
could, as it were, be ontologically illuminated only as they almost disap-
pear within a representation of their emergence from nothing. If art is the
principal site / sight (both place and view) of being as emergence into con-
nectedness, then the metaphysical dimension of the aesthetic—which may
also be its aesthetically distinguishing dimension—is an erosion of aesthetic
form. Origination is designated by figures of its perhaps not taking place;
the coming-to-be of relationality, which is our birth into being, can only be
retroactively enacted, and it is enacted largely as a rubbing out of formal
relations. Perhaps traditional associations of art with form-giving or form-
revealing activities are at least partly a denial of such formal disappearance
in art. If art celebrates an originating extensibility of all objects and creatures
into space—and therefore our connectedness to the universe—it does so by
also inscribing within connectedness the possibility of its not happening.
Relationality is itself related to its own absence. Emphatically present forms
designate nonaesthetic functions and registers of being. Brutally authorita-
tive interventions in space—presences secure in their legitimation—violate
the ecological ethic for which art trains us.
The notion of an immobility before relations is a heuristic device de-
signed to help us see the invisible rhythms of appearance and disappear-
ance in all being. There is a further question: why extend at all? Why do
objects and living beings even begin to move? Again, there is no beginning
of movement; nonetheless, relational movement requires an account of a
foundational motor—in the case of human subjects, a fundamental motiva-
tion for all movement. “Requires” in the sense that all particular motivations
of all particular movements share a founding structure of desire, by which
I mean a structure that accounts for the will to be in all things. Somewhat
unexpectedly, psychoanalysis, which has presented itself as the most finely
elaborated theory of desire in the history of human thought, will not be of
much help here. It has elaborated extremely tendentious accounts of desire,
accounts that make of the world we live in a place inherently alien to any
subject’s desire. Psychoanalysis has conceptualized desire as the mistaken
reaction to a loss; it has been unable to think desire as the confirmation of a
community of being.
“At the very beginning, it seems,” Freud writes in the 1915 essay “Instincts
and Their Vicissitudes,” “the external world, objects, and what is hated are
identical.” Not only at the very beginning: “As an expression of the reaction
of unpleasure evoked by objects,” he goes on, hate “always remains in an
intimate relation with the self-preservative instincts.”3 Given the (perceived)
fundamental hostility of the world to the self, the very possibility of object
relations depends on a certain mode of appropriation of the object. That
appropriating mode is identification, which plays a major role in the psycho-
analytic theory of self-constitution. The different internal agencies described
in The Ego and the Id are sediments of object relationships, the result of
the subject’s having composed its multiple identificatory acts into a psychi-
cally individuating design. The identificatory appropriation of the other is
especially striking in the Freudian account of love where, as Freud writes in
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, the object often “serves as a
substitute for some unattained ego ideal of our own. We love it on account
of the perfections which we have striven to reach for our own ego, and which
we should now like to procure in this roundabout way as a means of satisfying
our narcissism.”4
“Roundabout” indeed: in this account the external world would have
to be invented if it didn’t already exist in order for the subject to suppress
it. We need it in order to love ourselves, to have the illusorily objectified
self-confirmation of a mirror. Freud famously—or infamously—associated
narcissistic love with women and, as he writes in the essay “On Narcissism,”
“people whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance, such as
perverts or homosexuals.”5 But those of us who belong to one—or more—of
those unfortunate categories can perhaps take some solace from the fact that
Freud saw object love in the most privileged, the most happily developed
3. Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915), The Standard Edition of the Complete
Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953–74), 14:136, 139.
4. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Standard Edition, 18:112–13.
5. Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), Standard Edition. 14:88.
group—heterosexual men—as also motivated to some degree by a nostalgia

for the narcissism they have presumably given up. With this view of the
straight man yearning to be the self-contained, self-sufficient woman he
loves, the turning away from the other inherent in the Freudian account of
sexual love is nearly universalized, although it is a turning away identical to
an intense concentration on the other. Because what the man must appropri-
ate as his is the woman’s exclusion of him, he can narcissistically suppress
her only by an intense, mimetic attention to her self-absorption, her utterly
private pleasure in her own image.
I have used the word appropriate several times. The relational mecha-
nisms studied most thoroughly by psychoanalysis—identification, projec-
tion, introjection—could perhaps only have been theorized in a civilization
that has privileged an appropriative relation of the self to the world, one
that assumes a secure and fundamentally antagonistic distinction between
subject and object. While psychoanalysis has certainly demystified the sub-
ject’s disinterested pursuit of truth, it has had great difficulty positioning the
subject in a nonantagonistic, nonappropriative relation to the world. Indeed,
in dramatically desublimating the entire epistemological project in which
knowledge is the key to power, to mastery of the real, Freud did not free us
from that project; rather, he transformed it into a psychic fate. Psychoanalysis
has psychoanalyzed the subject’s need to master otherness, and, in so do-
ing, it has exposed that need as the inescapable consequence of the equally
inescapable dysfunctionality in the human subject’s efforts to negotiate the
world’s difference.
In the Lacanian Imaginary, difference is denied before there is even an
ego to oppose itself to difference. The jubilation with which the infant, in the
mirror stage, anticipates a unifying ego in the specular mirage of itself as a
unified physical form becomes, in the reenactments of Imaginary relational-
ity, the subject’s paranoid suspicion that the other is deliberately withhold-
ing the subject’s being. In his seminar Freud’s Papers on Technique, Lacan
emphasizes both the distinction and the correlation between physical and
psychological maturation. The subject’s imaginary mastery over its own body
in the mirror stage is also, Lacan writes, an anticipation of psychological
mastery, one that “will leave its mark [donner son style] on every subsequent
exercise of effective motor mastery.” But much more than an effect on physi-
cal mastery is involved. Lacan goes on to say that the anticipated mastery
of the mirror stage is “the original adventure through which man, for the
first time, has the experience of seeing himself, of reflecting on himself and
conceiving of himself as other than he is—an essential dimension of the
human, which entirely structures his fantasy life.”6 By giving such enormous
importance (and in spite of the possibility, indeed the necessity, of other
relational registers to which I’ll return in a moment) to this originating self-
(mis)recognition, Lacan suggests that the subject’s relation to the world will
always bear traces of (Lacan actually speaks of our entire fantasmatic life
being structured by) an original self-identification taking place before there
is a self, or more exactly a conscious ego, to be identified.
Psychoanalytic accounts of a dysfunctional relation between perception
and self-constitution can’t help but legitimize—in the sense of demonstrat-
ing their necessity—projects of mastery, since they ground all such projects
in a biologically determined history of self-apprehension. Indeed, they en-
dow power, or the impulse to master, with a certain pathos because mastery
turns out always to bear the mark of that “original adventure” in which we
celebrated our capacity for mastery (our bodily coordination and unity) by
locating it where it was not. That pathetically misconceived celebration was
bound to become a ferocious antagonism toward a world that prevents me
from joining my own being. The repetition of an original anticipation of
psychological mastery necessarily takes the form of a sense of loss, of theft. A
happy expectation is, retroactively, transformed into a hateful resentment.
Interestingly, Laplanche’s recently elaborated theory of the enigmatic
signifier provides yet another psychoanalytic version of relationality as initi-
ated by misapprehension, by a failure to relate. Laplanche’s concept of the
enigmatic signifier refers to an original and unavoidable seduction of the
child by the mother, a seduction inherent in the very nurturing of the child.
The seduction is not intentional; simply by her care, the parent implants in
the child the “unconscious and sexual significations” with which the adult
world is infiltrated and that are received in the form of an enigmatic signi-
fier, that is, a message by which the child is seduced but which he or she
cannot read.7 Laplanche speaks of this seductive address as an account of
the structural formation of the unconscious: primal repression would be the
making unconscious of those elements in the enigmatic signifier that infants
can’t “metabolize,” that they are incapable of understanding through some
form of symbolization. The implication here is that we are originally seduced
into a relation by messages we can’t read, enigmatic messages that are per-
haps inevitably interpreted as secrets. The result of this original seduction
6. Jacques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, vol. 1 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
trans. John Forrester, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York, 1991), p. 79.
7. Jean Laplanche, Seduction, Translation, Drives, trans. Martin Stanton, ed. John Fletcher and
Stanton (London, 1992), p. 188.
would be a tendency to structure all relations on the basis of an eroticizing

mystification. If we feel not only, as Freud proposed, that others threaten the
stability the ego must defend for its very survival, but also, more dangerously,
that we can be seduced by such threats—in Laplanchian terms, “shattered”
into an ego-shattering sexuality—then it is reasonable to confront others with
paranoid mistrust. The enigmatic signifier becomes a knowledge they are at
once willfully withholding from me and using in order to invade my being.
But this invasive secret can, in the final analysis, only be about me: the enig-
matic signifier seduces me because it “knows” me, because it contains in me
that which can be seduced, the very formula of a desire of which I myself
am ignorant. It is Proust who, with his usual psychoanalytic profundity, both
anticipates Laplanche’s notion and explicitly draws from it the conclusion
I have just proposed. “As there is no knowledge, one might almost say that
there is no jealousy, save of oneself.”8 The withheld secret Marcel anxiously
pursues in others is the fantasy formula of his own desires—in short, the
formula of that which sexualizes him.
Intersubjectivity in the psychoanalytic accounts I have just briefly out-
lined is a drama of property relations. The world dispossesses me of myself;
it threatens or steals the being that is properly mine, that is my property.
The Proustian, the Laplanchian, the Freudian, and the Lacanian imaginary
subject must master the world in order to repossess its self. The projective,
introjective, and identificatory techniques first studied by Freud are strategies
designed to suppress the otherness in which my sameness is hidden from my
consciousness. To paraphrase an author who made of this war between sub-
ject and object a gloriously lurid psychic drama (I refer to Melanie Klein), I
must impose my good objects on the world in order to prevent the world from
destroying me with my bad objects.
These are the most persuasive voices in psychoanalysis, far more persua-
sive than those comparatively cheerful theorists of object relations who pos-
tulate an adaptive fit between subject and object by simply dismissing the
powerful speculative arguments, from Freud to Lacan, for an irreducibly
intractable hostility between subject and object as well as between the in-
dividual and civilization. Significantly, when the thinkers I’ve been discuss-
ing imagine an alternative to the misapprehensions and the antagonisms
that make of human relationality a striking case of dysfunctional evolution,
they tend to do so at the expense of consciousness. In my previous work,
8. Marcel Proust, The Captive, in Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Ter-
ence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor, 3 vols. (New York, 1982), 3:392–93.
I have, following Laplanche, given great emphasis to that antinormative

strain of thought in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in which
Freud speaks of sexual pleasure as “a by-product . . . of a large number of
processes that occur in the organism, as soon as they reach a certain de-
gree of intensity, and most especially of any relatively powerful emotion,
even though it is of a distressing nature.”9 On the basis of passages such as
this one, Laplanche has formulated a theory of sexual excitement as an ef-
fect of ébranlement—perturbation or shattering—on the organism, an effect
that momentarily undoes psychic organization. I have pushed this to the
point of arguing, especially in The Freudian Body, that sexuality—at least
in the mode in which it is constituted—could be thought of as a tautology
for masochism.10 In other words, I have been proposing that we think of the
sexual—more specifically, of jouissance in sexuality—as a defeat of power,
a giving up, on the part of an otherwise hyperbolically self-affirming and
phallocentricly constituted ego, of its projects of mastery. Thus the subject
enters into a Bataille-like “communication” with otherness, one in which
the individuating boundaries that separate subjects, and that subjects for the
most part fiercely defend, are erased.
Bypassing Laplanche, in whom it would apparently have displeased them
to find any of this, the French École lacanienne has recently shown great
interest in what it judges to be the closeness of certain aspects of Ameri-
can gay and lesbian studies to Lacan’s reflections on jouissance in the 1970s.
The meeting point between these improbable intellectual allies would be
“la question du non-rapport sexuel,” as it was recently defined in the review
L’Unebévue—that is, the sexual as an absence of relations, a failure to connect.
Jean Allouch evokes Foucault describing “le délire amoureux” as a “perte de
soi,” an experience in which the individual “no longer knows who he is,” lives
his pleasure as a “perpetual self-forgetting.” Allouch goes on to quote, with
approval, my own gloss in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” on Freud’s association
of sexual excitement with a loss of psychic organization and coherence—a
gloss in which I say that Freud’s definition “removes the sexual from the
intersubjective.” Allouch praises the Lacanian resonance of this comment
and concludes with a definition of fucking as “a defeat of the subjective
as such.”11
9. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Standard Edition, 7:233.
10. See Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York, 1986), pp. 37–39.
11. Jean Allouch, “Pour introduire le sexe du maître,” L’Unebévue 11 (1998): 58–59, and Bersani, “Is
the Rectum a Grave?” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis / Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge,
Mass., 1988), p. 197.
Much of this now seems to me a rather facile, even irresponsible cel-

ebration of “self-defeat.” Masochism is not a viable alternative to mastery,
either practically or theoretically. The defeat of the self belongs to the same
relational system, the same relational imagination, as the self’s exercise of
power; it is merely the transgressive version of that exercise. Masochism con-
sents to, indeed embraces that theft of being which mastery would remedy
by obliterating otherness through a fantasmatic invasion of difference. To
neglect self-defeat in sexual relations leads to that pastoralizing of sexuality
that I have frequently criticized; but to privilege self-defeat in the relational
field is to reduce that entire field to libidinal relationality. In psychoanalysis,
the relational is tendentiously modeled on the libidinal. Perhaps the crucial
move here—I’m tempted to say the crucial mistake here—is an interpreta-
tion of desire as lack. The world perceived as inherently hostile to the self
(Freud), the world as withholding the “secret” of the subject’s sexual being
(Laplanche on the enigmatic signifier), the world as containing the subject’s
future completion as a coordinated form (Lacan’s relationally initiating mir-
ror stage): in all these cases the subject is either in danger of being stolen
or has already suffered a loss of self. Fantasmatic—and, if possible, real—
mastery places the subject in the world on the subject’s own terms; no lon-
ger an agent of loss, the world is now the coerced repairer of loss. Desire is
polarized between lack and possession; the activity of desire is what moves
the subject from the one to the other. Relationality is grounded in antago-
nism and misapprehension, which means that to meet the world is always to
see the world as a place where I am not—or, if I am there, it is as alienated
and / or unrecognizable being.
Finally, misapprehension remains a fundamental relational mode even in
what is probably the most interesting attempt, within psychoanalytic history,
to conceptualize a productive relation of the subject to the world. I refer to
Lacan’s theory of desire, a theory that depends, in its most psychoanalytically
original move, on a depsychologizing of desire and an emphasis on what
might be called desire’s ontological dignity. Desire is grounded in loss—
not the loss of any particular object but rather of being itself. The sacrifice
of being is the price we pay when we enter language, when we become
creatures who have meaning. Wholly inexpressible, resistant to any kind of
symbolization, being retroactively comes to signify lost presence and fullness.
Desire is the doomed but limitlessly rich attempt to recover that fullness
through objects that are ontologically incommensurable with it. There is
no foundational object of desire, only what Tim Dean has called “the per-
petual illusion of a secret beyond language, and it is this enigma that elicits
desire.”12 In her most recent work, Kaja Silverman appeals to this Lacanian
theory in order to put forth a brilliant argument about what she calls our
“passion for symbolization”—the way in which we allow other creatures and
things to incarnate the originary nonobject of desire.13 The very lack of that
originary object propels us toward the world and toward the future; lack and
loss are the bases for our passionate interest in things, for desire’s multiple
relations with the world’s appearances. Thus lack, in this account, is, in-
triguingly, the precondition for metonymic excess—for all our productively
mistaken desires for real objects and real people. Logically, there is no limit
to this productivity, since the objects we pursue, while they trace the design
of our individual desiring histories, are meant to recover that which preex-
ists all object-choices, to “repair,” not the anecdotal, anatomical castration
of oedipal anxieties but, much more impressively, the ontological castration
through which we presumably entered the human community of significa-
tion. No object could ever be an adequate substitute for an objectless being
that never was. The ultimate foundation of desire’s productivity in this ac-
count is the pursuit of, and nostalgia for, nothingness.
Is lack necessary to desire?14 Perhaps the founding text, in the Western tra-
dition, of desire as lack is Plato’s Symposium. It will therefore be all the more
astonishing to see this extraordinary Platonic dialogue dismiss what appears
to be its most unambiguously formulated argument. At a formal drinking
party held in honor of the tragedian Agathon’s first dramatic triumph, the
guests agree to give speeches in praise of love. Socrates, the last to speak,
is preceded by Agathon, who, complaining that those who preceded him
had “congratulate[d] human beings on the good things that come to them
from the god” of love rather than praising him “first for what he is,” had
eloquently enumerated Eros’s qualities. Eros is beautiful, young, delicate,
brave, temperate, just, and wise. Immediately after the enthusiastic applause
with which the handsome tragedian’s praise of love is received, Socrates,
claiming—to the disbelief of the others—that he can only be tongue-tied
“after a speech delivered with such beauty and variety,” proceeds to demolish
what Agathon has said—and, implicitly, to criticize the speeches given by all
the others—for praising Eros, attributing to him “the grandest and the most
12. See Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago, 2000).

13. See Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford, Calif., 2000).
14. In Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari addressed this question. While sympathiz-
ing with the argument made in that book that desire does not lack anything, I will propose a way of
understanding this that does not depend, as does their argument, on the denial of a desiring subject.
See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert
Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis, 1983).
beautiful qualities” rather than telling the truth about him. The truth, as
Socrates swiftly demonstrates in a characteristically coercive exchange with
the docile Agathon, is that we desire only that which we lack: “anyone . . .
who has a desire desires what is not at hand and not present, what he does
not have, and what he is not, and that of which he is in need; for such are the
objects of desire and love.” Thus, if love is the desire of “that of which it is the
love,” and if, as the others have agreed, love pursues, or makes men pursue,
the beautiful and the good, then love itself must be without those qualities.
Love can’t be beautiful and good if it desires beautiful and good things—a
conclusion Agathon finds so irresistible that he readily admits not knowing
what he was talking about in his speech.15
Desire is, then, a lack of being. The apparent importance of this position
in the Symposium is underlined by the fact that it is the only philosophical
claim made directly by Socrates; the rest of his contribution to this exercise in
intellectual sociability is mediated through his memory of the lessons in love
once given to him by the wise woman Diotima. Furthermore, dissatisfied with
Agathon when he merely acknowledges that it “wouldn’t be likely” for some-
one to “actually have what he desires and loves” at the very time of desiring
and loving something, Socrates insists that they agree on the necessity of the
inherence of lack in desire: “I can’t tell you, Agathon, how strongly it strikes
me that this is necessary” (S, p. 482). Finally, in order to forestall one possible
criticism of his argument, Socrates himself brings up the potential coun-
terexamples of strong men who wish to be strong, tall men who wish to be
tall—only to point out that what they mean is that they want to possess these
things in time to come. Unable to desire things they already have, they are
expressing their desire for the future health, the future tallness they now lack.
And yet even in the couple of pages in which the argument for desire as
lack or need is so forcefully made, Socrates’ coercive move is preceded by a
logical confusion that makes us glimpse the possibility of love, or desire, as
including within itself its object. Socrates begins his correction of Agathon
by asking him if he agrees—and of course he will—that love must be a
love of something rather than of nothing. He explains his question by saying
that it’s as if he were asking whether a father is the father of something or
not—or whether a mother or a brother are mother and brother of something.
But are these familial relations really analogous to the relation of desire to
that which it lacks? If lack is intrinsic to desire, the object of desire must be
absent from the activity of desiring. “Father,” on the other hand, specifies a
15. Plato, The Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Complete Works, ed.
John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, 1997), pp. 477, 481, 482, 483; hereafter abbreviated S.
relation; not only is a father the father of something (as desire is the desire of
something), but the word itself includes, and therefore largely defines, the
other relational term. The analogy Socrates proposes in order to elucidate
his notion of desire as lack actually raises the possibility of a desire the other
term of which would be an extension, another version, of that which con-
stitutes the very activity of desiring. “Father” is not a relation of need to an
object it might seek to possess; it rather evokes what we might call inaccurate
replications, or a modified sameness, of itself. That which is external to it is
included in that which identifies or individuates it. Thus by its very enuncia-
tion “father” moves toward “child,” and this logical model of relationality not
initiated by lacks or gaps of being might start us moving toward relationality
acknowledged as an ontological necessity antecedent to lack. Presence is
always relational; desire would be the affective recognition of something like
our debt to all those forms of being that relationally define and activate our
being. Desire mobilizes correspondences of being.
Much more decisively than the short passage I’ve been discussing, the
entire text of the Symposium refutes the ostensibly privileged idea of love or
desire as lack. On the one hand, we are tempted to give Socrates an authority
none of the other figures in the dialogue enjoys. His is the last speech—as
if there were a narrative movement toward a philosophical climax in which
we are given the “truth” about love—and the authority of what Socrates
says is reinforced by the single speech that follows it, which is Alcibiades’
praise of Socrates himself. On the other hand, it is difficult to locate author-
ity in Plato’s Symposium. To begin with, can we even be sure that this is an
authoritative account of what took place, of what was said, at that celebrated
banquet? The time of the narrative is several years after the event, which has,
it seems, acquired a certain notoriety among Athenians interested in hearing
about Socrates. The dialogue begins with a singularly convoluted account of
how Apollodorus, who will report on the events in question, learned about
them himself. To an unnamed acquaintance who asks him about that dinner
long ago, Apollodorus responds that another friend—Glaucon—had just
a few days before come to him with the same request. Knowing that Apol-
lodorus has made it his job “to know exactly what [Socrates] says and does
each day,” Glaucon, who had heard a garbled version of the banquet from
a man who had himself learned about it from Phoenix, mistakenly thought
that Apollodorus—who in fact has been Socrates’ companion only for the
past three years—had himself been at the dinner. Apollodorus rather gruffly
set Glaucon straight and told him that he himself learned about it from “the
very same man who told Phoenix, a fellow called Aristodemus” who went to
the party with Socrates. So Apollodorus, who had checked “part of” Aristode-
mus’s story with Socrates (“who agreed with his account”), told it to Glaucon
and is now about to tell it again to the “rich businessman” (S, pp. 458, 459)
whose question originally led, not to Apollodorus giving straightaway the ac-
count of things he had gotten from the banquet guest Aristodemus, but rather
to that curious detour that goes from Glaucon to the man with the garbled
version to Phoenix, who may or may not have made things garbled, back to
Aristodemus. The latter, however, according to Apollodorus, “couldn’t re-
member exactly what everyone said,” and, Apollodorus adds, “I myself don’t
remember everything he told me. But I’ll tell you,” he says to his friend,
adding two more qualifications, “I’ll tell you what he remembered best, and
what I consider the most important points” (S, p. 463).
So we may have a highly selective and approximate account of the
speeches given during the banquet. Remember also that the Symposium’s
most celebrated and presumably authoritative speech is actually Socrates’ re-
port of what Diotima told him in a series of meetings, which Socrates himself
may not remember with total accuracy but which he will report on, he tells
his fellow guests, “as best I can on my own” (S, p. 484). Indirect transmission,
distance from the event, scattered sources, the perhaps doubtful credibility
of the sources: all this implicitly encourages us not to lean too heavily on
any one argument and perhaps even to reconsider what we might mean by
philosophical seriousness. This is not to put into question Plato’s intellectual
commitment to the theory of Forms outlined by Diotima, the progression
from love of beautiful bodies to the love of absolute Beauty. I do mean to sug-
gest, however, that in the Symposium that theory is less important than the
textual relationality in which it has its place, and, as a consequence, meaning
itself is reconceived as a certain kind of movement. Unable to be absolutely
certain that we are getting it right, that the report is entirely accurate, we are
freer to attend to what might be called the text’s disseminated authority. We
note, for example, that instead of a single most authoritative voice, we have
voices—and indeed structures—that echo one another. Here are some of
them: Apollodorus repeats to the businessman the account of the banquet
he has already given to Glaucon. The speeches about love are framed by the
arrivals of two uninvited guests: Aristodemus at the beginning, Alcibiades at
the end. After the speeches on love, Alcibiades begins what is at least planned
as a second series of encomia, this time with each man present praising the
guest to his right (or perhaps choosing the topic of the speech to be given
by that guest). Socrates begins his speech about love by reporting that he
“had told [Diotima] almost the same things Agathon told [him] . . . : that
love is a great god and that he belongs to beautiful things.” Diotima “used
the very same arguments against [Socrates] that [he] used against Agathon;
she showed how . . . love is neither beautiful nor good” (S, p. 484). None of
these repetitions is exact, and the difference in the final case is especially
significant. Socrates’ correction of Agathon goes no further than proving that
need is inherent in desire and that Eros, lacking good and beautiful things,
can be neither good nor beautiful. With Diotima, Socrates, unlike Agathon
with him, had drawn an apparently logical conclusion from this: “Is love
ugly, then, and bad?” Shocked, Diotima admonishes him to “watch [his]
tongue” and proceeds to instruct him—in a manner not unlike Socrates’
instructional style with his partners in dialogue—that love is between wisdom
and ignorance, between beauty and ugliness (S, p. 484). Love, like all great
spirits, according to Diotima, shuttles between opposites, between ignorance
and wisdom, between what is mortal and what is immortal. This between-
ness is a conceptual echo of our textual betweenness, of the reader’s move-
ment between the inaccurately replicative voices, structures, and ideas that
constitute the Symposium’s text.
Ideationally, the replicative structure I find most interesting is constituted
by Aristophanes’ and Diotima’s speeches. It may seem odd to refer to these
speeches as echoes of one another. Diotima explicitly (and anachronisti-
cally: she instructed Socrates about love before the banquet took place) re-
futes Aristophanes’ contribution to the Symposium. Referring to “a certain
story . . . according to which lovers are those people who seek their other
halves,” she argues that “a lover does not seek the half or the whole, unless,
my friend, it turns out to be good as well. . . . What everyone loves is re-
ally nothing other than the good” (S, pp. 488–89). And immediately follow-
ing the Socrates-Diotima section, “Aristophanes was trying to make himself
heard over [the “loud applause” and “cheers” of the other guests] in order
to make a response to something Socrates had said about his own speech”
(S, p. 494)—a response that has hardly begun before it is interrupted by the
arrival of Alcibiades and his drunken party. The differences between the two
(including the difference between the whimsical turn of Aristophanes’ fable
and the pedagogical and philosophical solemnity of Diotima’s speech) are
obvious but also somewhat misleading. Let’s first of all note that Diotima sig-
nificantly modifies Socrates’ view that the lover of beautiful and good things
desires to possess those things. The lover wants not beauty, she teaches, but
rather “reproduction and birth in beauty” (S, p. 490).
Far from expressing an emptiness, Eros, according to Diotima, is the sign
of a fullness, an inner plenitude that seeks to reproduce itself in the world.
She speaks of someone “pregnant” with “wisdom and the rest of virtue”
(S, p. 491).16 In philosophical discourse with the beautiful soul that acts as
a catalyst, or midwife, of this self-reproduction, the lover submits his own
ideas to a dialogue in which he not only “educates” the other, as Diotima
says, but also “corresponds” with the dialogic modulations of his own philo-
sophical being. An important consequence, even goal, of this exchange is
to transform the loved one into a lover. This transformation is a recurrent
motif in the Symposium (another replicative structure). In the first speech
in praise of love, Phaedrus explains that the gods honored Achilles over
Alcestis (who sacrificed her own life so that her husband Admetus might
live) because Achilles, originally Patrocles’ beloved, had made himself Pa-
trocles’ lover by his willingness to die in order to avenge Patrocles’ death.
With an important modification, Alcibiades, according to his own account,
underwent the same transformation in his relation with Socrates. Socrates,
“crazy about beautiful boys” whom, as Alcibiades puts it, he follows around
“in a perpetual daze,” had pursued Alcibiades. The latter, confident in his
good looks, set out to seduce Socrates, inviting him to dinner, he says, “as
if I were his lover and he my young prey,” and brazenly offering him the
sex he assumes Socrates wants (S, pp. 498, 499). Thus Alcibiades, notwith-
standing the sexually “passive” role he seems willing to take for Socrates,
also becomes the active lover. But now the reversal of roles is much more
complexly viewed than in the case of Achilles. Alcibiades starts out by inter-
preting his seductive activity entirely as an acquisitive project—in terms of
desire as lack. He assumed, he tells the banquet guests, that what Socrates
wanted was him—to possess him—so he thought that if he “let [Socrates]
have his way with” him, he, Alcibiades, would in turn make Socrates teach
him “everything he knew” (S, p. 499). In this exchange of possessions, the
philosopher gets the body he wants and the young man gets the philos-
opher’s wisdom. Socrates fails to take up the offer because, as Alcibiades
obscurely recognizes, he’s interested in a different kind of activity in the
young men he apparently pursues. If, as Alcibiades somewhat humorously
16. David Halperin has written brilliantly about the “feminine” paradigm to which Plato’s erotic
doctrine, as expressed by Diotima, is assimilated or, as Halperin puts it, is a paradigm Plato appropriates
in order to “image the reciprocal and (pro)creative erotics of (male) philosophical intercourse” (David
M. Halperin, “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality” and Other Essays on Greek Love [New York,
1990], p. 150). When, according to Diotima, a person pregnant with wisdom and virtue meets another
soul “that is beautiful and noble and well-formed,” he himself “instantly teem[s] with ideas and argu-
ments about virtue . . . he conceives and gives birth to what he has been carrying inside him for ages”
(S, p. 492). Erotic desire, as Halperin also suggests, does not lead to pregnancy but is rather caused
by pregnancy; in a philosopher it climaxes in the “ejaculation” not of a baby but of “ideas . . . about
virtue” (Halperin, “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality” and Other Essays on Greek Love, p. 140).
complains, Socrates “has deceived us all: he presents himself as your lover,

and, before you know it, you’re in love with him yourself” (S, p. 503), it is
because, in a sense, Socrates has nothing to offer, nothing to fill the gap of a
lover’s desire. Just as his young lovers’ beauty is what excites Socrates to give
birth to the ideas teeming in his own philosophically pregnant being, so he
expects those he loves to respond to his spiritual beauty by giving birth to the
virtue and the wisdom in themselves. In short, the goal of a relation of love
with Socrates is the loving subject’s communication with himself through
the other—not the suppression of the other through such psychoanalytic
strategies as projection and identification, but rather the bringing to term
the other’s pregnancy of soul. Self-delivery fertilizes the philosophical per-
spective, in dialogue, of otherness.
Aristophanes’ fable has of course already given us the Symposium’s most
unambiguous version of Eros as pursuit of the same. According to that fable,
there were originally three kinds of human beings: male, female, and a com-
bination of the two. Each spherically shaped person had four heads, four
legs, two faces, two sets of sexual organs. As punishment for these powerful
and ambitious humans’ attempt to vanquish the gods, Zeus had the luminous
idea of cutting each person in two, “the way people . . . cut eggs with hairs”
(S, p. 474). The result of this is that every human being is longing for his or
her lost other half. “Love,” Aristophanes tells his fellow guests, “is born into
every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together;
it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature” (S, p.
474). Those who were originally all male pursue other men; those who were
split from a woman are, as Aristophanes specifies, “oriented more towards
women, and lesbians come from this class” (S, p. 475), while the original
androgynes are now heterosexuals (who, if the prelapsarian race was divided
equally among the three types, would, curiously enough, make up only one-
third of present humanity). Like the conversion of Achilles and Alcibiades
from loved one to lover, Aristophanes’ myth, as Foucault has noted, does
away with the generally accepted asymmetry in ancient Greece between the
lover and the loved one, the active partner and the passive partner, in a ped-
erastic relation. But while differences of behavior remain between Patrocles
and Achilles, and, more significantly, between Socrates and Alcibiades, Aris-
tophanes establishes a perfect “symmetry and equality” between lovers. For
two lovers are really a single being; each is moved toward the other by the
same desire, the same pleasure.17
17. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Hurley, vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality (New York,
1985), p. 232.
We are, however, left with a difficult question: is this love for our lost half
motivated by lack? This would certainly seem to be the case: a lover longs
for what he or she no longer has, the missing half of his or her being. Love,
Aristophanes concludes, is an attempt at repossession; it “is the name for our
pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete” (S, p. 476). But what
does it mean to lack oneself? If love in Aristophanes’ fable is a desire moti-
vated by lack or need, what the lover lacks is identical to what he is. It is more
of what he is. This is a lack based, not on difference (as in the view of Eros
desiring that which is different from it, the beautiful and the good that it is
not), but rather on the extensibility of sameness. Aristophanes’ speech makes
a mythic narrative, a story, out of what I am proposing as an ontological real-
ity: all being moves toward, corresponds with itself outside of itself. This self-
desiring movement defeats specular narcissism, for it erases the individuating
boundaries within which an ego might frame and contemplate itself. The
self loved in what I have called elsewhere an impersonal narcissism can’t be
specularized because it can’t be personalized; the self out there is “mine”
without belonging to me. Aristophanes also makes clear that once sameness
is divided from itself, desire for the same can no longer be a relation between
exactly identical terms. The “ideal,” he says is to “recover [our] original na-
ture.” But where is that exactly identical other half? It is of course nowhere
to be found, in addition to which the splitting in two is itself a phylogenetic
memory. So, as Aristophanes concedes, “the nearest approach to it is best in
present circumstances. . . . Love does the best that can be done for the time
being” (S, p. 476).
We love, in other words, inaccurate replications of ourselves. The philo-
sophical lesson of the fable is that we relate to difference by recognizing and
longing for sameness. All love is, in a sense, homoerotic. Even in the love
between a man and a woman, each partner rejoices in finding himself, or
herself, in the other. This is not the envy of narcissistic enclosure that Freud
thought he detected in male heterosexual desire; it is rather an expression of
the security humans can feel when they embrace difference as the supple-
mental benefit of a universal replication and solidarity of being. Each subject
reoccurs differently everywhere.
Finally, if, as I said earlier, art is the site of being as emergence into con-
nectedness, the Symposium both thematizes that emergence in speeches
about love and pedagogically performs (as befits the educative mission of
Socrates) its own textual emergence as inaccurately self-replicating ideas
and structures. At the beginning of our philosophical and literary tradition,
Plato’s dialogue makes an invaluable contribution to our own discussions of

why human subjects intervene in the world, of what moves us to connect.
The Symposium offers an account of connectedness according to which re-
lations are initiated because they are already there. Its various registers of
replication—of reoccurence of the same—disclose, bring to being what is in
truth our already established at-homeness in the world.
8
Can Sex Make Us Happy?
The incompatibility of civilization and individual happiness is at once a ba-

nality and an overstatement. Everyone knows that in order to enjoy the ben-
efits of living in civilized groups we must all sacrifice, to some degree, the
satisfaction of personal interests and passions. Not only that: civilization—to
utter another commonplace—actually helps to create the conditions for hap-
piness. As Freud recognizes in Civilization and Its Discontents, “it is certain
that all the means we use in our attempts to protect ourselves against the
threat of suffering belong to this very civilization” to which he none the less
assigns “much of the blame for our misery” (pp. 25, 24). In any case, it might
justifiably be thought that the tensions between the claims of the individual
and those of civilization constitute an argument more appropriate to sociol-
ogy than to psychoanalysis. Indeed, the argument is impressively elaborated
in the work of the great sociologist Georg Simmel who, in his 1910 essay “The
Sociology of Sociability,” formulated a thesis similar to Freud’s in more mea-
sured, less melodramatic terms:
The great problems placed before [the ethical forces of society as it is] are that
the individual has to fit himself into a whole system and live for it: that, how-
ever, out of this system values and enhancement must flow back to him, that
the life of the individual is but a means for the ends of the whole, the life of the
whole but an instrument for the purposes of the individual.
Originally published in Raritan 21, no. 4 (Spring 2002): 15–30, and as the Introduction to Civilization
and Its Discontents, Penguin Books, 2002.
c a n s e x m a k e u s h a p p y ? | 121
For Simmel, as, it would seem, for Freud, “the great problem of asso-
ciation [of human groups]” is ‘that of the measure of significance and ac-
cent which belongs to the individual as such in and as against the social
milieu.’1
In referring to the sociological banality of Civilization and Its Discontents’
thesis, I take my cue from Freud himself. One of the most curious aspects
of Civilization and Its Discontents is Freud’s reiterated self-reproach to the
effect that he is not speaking psychoanalytically. The work was written in
1929, late in Freud’s career, so it’s not as if he hadn’t had time to develop a
distinctively psychoanalytic language. You would think that by now Freud
would be ‘speaking psychoanalysis’ fluently. But the complaints start in Sec-
tion III, where he laments that “our study . . . has so far taught us little that
is not generally known” (p. 24), little, that is, that might not have been said
without the help of psychoanalysis. Given the repetition of this complaint
three more times in the work, we should be alert to anything that breaks the
self-critical trend, to any moment when Freud might be saying: ‘This is it!
Now I’m being profound, saying things that people didn’t know before I said
them! Now I’m speaking the language of psychoanalysis!’
To the reader’s great relief, there is just such a moment in Civilization
and Its Discontents. Before focusing on the crucial passage in which, appar-
ently, Freud’s investigation finally takes a distinctively psychoanalytic turn,
let’s note that the argument about human misery necessarily depends on
certain assumptions about what would make us happy. While Civilization
and Its Discontents will singularly complicate the very distinction between
happiness and misery, twenty years earlier, in the essay “‘Civilized’ Sexual
Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” Freud had offered a very uncompli-
cated version of the presumed opposition between civilization and individual
happiness. In the 1908 piece, Freud doesn’t worry about saying things that
everyone already knows, and his argument is immediately recognizable as a
psychoanalytic argument—if only in the crudest popular sense of what con-
stitutes a psychoanalytic discourse. It’s all about sex—just as the early critics
of psychoanalysis complained. “Anyone qualified to investigate the condi-
tioning factors of nervous illness will soon be convinced that the increase of
nervous disorders in our society is due to the greater restrictions placed on
sexual activity” (p. 96). Or: “the baleful influence of civilization is reduced
to the harmful suppression of sexual life in ‘civilized’ peoples (or classes) by
the “civilized” sexual morality prevailing in them” (p. 88).
1. Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Sociability,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N.
Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 137 and 130.
Freud anticipates the sexual liberationists of the 1960s, although he of

course sounds more proper then they will even when he is making the most
radical argument. Indeed, we shouldn’t allow the propriety of vocabulary to
obscure just how radical the argument is. Not only does civilization keep us
from getting enough sex; it prevents us from having the kind of sex many of
us most deeply want. “Today’s ‘civilized’ sexual morality” permits “only legiti-
mate reproduction . . . as a sexual aim” (p. 92); it “demands of the individual,
whether man or woman . . . premarital abstinence, and life-long abstinence
for all who do not enter into a lawful marriage” (p. 95). Since, as Freud had
already argued in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), “the hu-
man sex drive does not originally serve the purposes of reproduction at all,”
but rather aims “to obtain particular kinds of pleasure,” and since “whole
classes of individuals” don’t quite make it “from auto-eroticism to object-love,
with the aim of genital union” (the presumably normative development), a
monogamous heterosexual marriage is hardly a blueprint for universal happi-
ness. The sex life of individuals whose sexual development has been arrested
can in fact “take on a serviceable final form,” and the sex drive of “inverts”
(homosexuals) even has “a special aptitude,” Freud claims, “for cultural sub-
limation” (p. 92). But neither inverts nor other perverts can fully display their
cultural gifts, since they have to suppress their drives without, however, be-
ing able to get rid of them. The “perverse impulses,” once repressed, come
back in the disguise of neurotic symptoms: potentially healthy and socially
viable sex drives have been transformed by “civilized morality” into culturally
useless nervous illness. Not only that: the developmentally lucky ones—het-
erosexual men and women with a predominantly genital sex drive—are not
much happier than repressed perverts. Premarital abstinence leads people to
seek “a substitutive satisfaction of a neurotic kind, marked by pathological
symptoms” (p. 96). Not only does it lead vast numbers of unhappy hetero-
sexuals to expect much more, and more durable, sexual satisfaction than a
monogamous union can bring; the frustrated male who has had recourse
to masturbation and even homosexuality is also likely to have only “limited
potency” in marriage, which in turn makes it likely that his wife—already
crippled by the sexual ignorance at least theoretically mandatory for proper
young women in Freud’s time—will be frigid. Thus “preparation for mar-
riage frustrates the aims of marriage itself” (p. 99); the disappointed couple
“will soon abandon sexual intercourse as the source of all their embarrass-
ments, and with it the basis of married life” (p. 102).
“‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” is an eloquent
indictment of a repressive sexual morality. While much of it seems dated
today—especially the section on the enforced sexual ignorance of unmar-

ried young women—it would be presumptuous to congratulate ourselves on
having moved significantly beyond the sexual education of young people in
the Vienna of Freud’s lifetime. The American Christian right has success-
fully seen to it that a large number of sex education courses in high school
“teach” only abstinence and make no mention of contraception. Freud’s
essay is more a psychological curiosity than an historically obsolete docu-
ment. For one thing, Freud seems astonishingly naive about the benefits of
sex (lots of sex), even though, as we shall see, it is also Freud who has taught
us to recognize his hymn of praise to sex as naive. Sexual abstinence (while
it may be useful for “young scholars . . . ”), far from producing great art-
ists or “independent men of action or original thinkers, bold liberators and
reformers,” will “more often . . . produce well-behaved weaklings who later
merge into the great mass of those who habitually, if reluctantly, follow the
lead given by strong [that is, strongly sexed?] individuals” (p. 98). Because
women are denied “the opportunity to take an intellectual interest in sexual
problems . . . they are deterred from thinking at all, and knowledge loses its
value for them.” The “undoubted intellectual inferiority of so many women
can be traced back to the inhibition of thought that is essential for sexual
suppression” (p. 100). The energy with which a man pursues all his goals in
life, Freud astonishingly and unquestioningly maintains, is a function of how
“energetically [he] conquers his sex object.” For “a person’s sexual behavior
often sets the pattern for all his other ways of reacting to the world” (p. 99).
Finally, Freud is extremely—and almost embarrassingly—ambiguous
about all those “substitutive” activities into which premarital abstinence
pushes young people. On the one hand, they are emotionally and morally
dangerous. Masturbation “corrupts the character through indulgence in
more ways than one” (masturbators will take “the easy route” in the pursuit
of “significant goals”). Nongenital intercourse (the “perverse” forms of sex—
presumably oral and anal) “are ethically objectionable in that they degrade a
love-relationship between two human beings from something serious [that is,
genital?] into a convenient game that entails no danger or spiritual involve-
ment.” Perhaps most disastrously of all, constitutionally or developmentally
predestined homosexuals “are now joined by many others,” who, unable to
go along with “the mainstream of the libido,” glide into a considerably wid-
ened “homosexual side-channel” (pp. 100–101). Worst of all—the argument
is worth returning to—“all those men who as a result of masturbatory or
perverse practices have oriented their libido to anything other than the nor-
mal situations and conditions of satisfaction, develop a diminished potency
in marriage” (p. 101). But why? You might argue that when “normal” sex
is finally allowed, potency would be increased: all that pent-up genitality
can at last, legitimately and joyfully, explode. In “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality
and Modern Nervous Illness,” Freud comes close to giving an anticipatory
validation to homophobic fears, all too familiar to us, that heterosexuals can
somehow be seduced into homosexuality and, especially, that if they do cross
that line they may be permanently lost to, or spoiled for, heterosexuality. The
normal, it would appear, is exceedingly vulnerable. To retaste the perverse is
to lose some of our passion for the nonperverse; the danger of developmental
backtracking is that we may never again have much enthusiasm for going
forward.
“‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” is psychoana-
lytically muddled. By that I mean that its muddlement is constitutive of its
limited but real interest. A rational and humane protest against the sexual
abstinence imposed on sexually energetic young men and women is in fact
a cry of alarm from someone who clearly—but also confusedly and perhaps
unwillingly—knows something that this repressive society doesn’t know (or
pretends not to know). What he knows has something to do with both the
power and the nature of sexuality. The apparent naiveté I referred to earlier
about the benefits of lots of sex may be, more profoundly, a warning about
the danger of postponing the pleasures of “normal” intercourse. More ex-
actly, it is a warning about the danger of postponing the repressive strength
of those pleasures. Society’s repression defeats a more important repression
(important for society): a repression of the sexual as such. For if we need
frequent sex, and if having sex makes us fit for all of life’s other activities, it’s
because sex is something like—to use an image we will find in Civilization
and Its Discontents—an oceanic force, one that threatens to flood our lives,
to drown our other interests. The immense stupidity of society is to create the
ideal conditions for such a flooding—that is, to liberate sexuality through the
repression of sex. If society would just allow young men and women to have
(presumably) normal sex, the women will think more clearly and the men
will be better artists and bolder political activists. But by interfering with the
teleology, the purpose, and the direction of sexual development, society un-
does one of the great conquests of human evolution: the use of reproductive
sex as a sexual hygiene, a mode of sexual containment. The real substitutive
activity is heterosexual genital monogamy; its milder pleasures discipline
the overwhelming pleasures of perverse sex—which is to say, perhaps, the
pleasures of the sexual itself. Astonishingly, then, Freud may secretly agree
with the society he sternly criticizes: civilization requires sexual repression
because unrepressed sexuality might destroy civilization. But strategically so-

ciety has got it all wrong. The right way to go about the necessary damming
up of the oceanic is to let people swim in the calmer waters of what might
be called genital relationality: the waters of sex-cum-love, of sex promoted
to, as Freud puts it, “something serious,” something more than mere “indul-
gence,” something “that entails . . . danger or spiritual involvement” (p. 101).
In other words, a kind of sublimated sexuality in which what is (necessarily?)
repressed would no longer produce neurosis (that is, the inevitable return of
the repressed in the disguise of neurotic symptoms).
T wenty years later, Civilization and Its Discontents will take up the princi-
pal thesis of “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,”
but the implicit optimism of the 1908 essay will be notably absent. Now
there is hardly any suggestion that to remove the socially imposed barriers
to sexual satisfaction would serve the cause of either civilization or individ-
ual happiness. For one thing, what a more liberal society might allow us to
enjoy—nonmonogamous heterosexual genital sex—is explicitly presented
as a pale substitute for pleasures that no civilized society could be imagined
as authorizing. In section II, Freud tells us that the intensity of satisfactions
provided by scientific or artistic work is “restrained when compared with that
which results from the sating of crude, primary drives: they do not convulse
our physical constitution” (p. 18). What did convulse our being, Freud sug-
gests in the astonishing footnotes on the first and last pages of section IV, was
the experience, or rather the smell of sex before we adopted an erect posture.
But our sexuality fell when we stood up. Both anal eroticism and olfactory
stimulation were subjected to what Freud calls “organic repression” (p. 42);
the result of this “repression” is our horror of excrement and, at least accord-
ing to Freud, a repugnance at sex, a shame provoked in us by our genitals and
a disgust at genital odors which is so strong in many people that it “spoil[s]
their enjoyment of sexual intercourse.” And what a loss this was! By the end
of the last footnote in section IV, Freud has transformed man’s depreciation
of the sense of smell in sex into the repression of “the whole of his sexuality”
(p. 43). Nothing is stranger in Civilization and Its Discontents than the eroti-
cally confessional footnotes—that is, those moments when the distinguished
(if at times both extravagant and banal) anthropological imagination of the
text descends into a footnote where it enjoys the fantasy of a mythic, prehis-
toric convulsing of our physical being in the passionate sniffing of a male
on all fours.
An unfortunate consequence of evolution is, then, what most of us,
according to Freud, experience as the “unaccountable repugnance” (p. 43)

that accompanies sexual love (“the model for all happiness,” p. 37). At bot-
tom, we are all insatiable and unhappily repressed perverts. We are, both
ontogenetically and phylogenetically, “coded” for pleasures we can no longer
legitimately enjoy. But Civilization and Its Discontents goes even further
than this. Not only is our sexuality dysfunctional from both developmental
and evolutionary perspectives; there is, it would seem, something inherently
dysfunctional in sexuality itself (repressed or unrepressed). At the the end of
section IV, Freud raises a disturbing possibility: “Now and then one seems
to realize that this [the diminished importance of sex as a source of happi-
ness] is not just the pressure of civilization, but that something inherent in
the [sexual] function itself denies us total satisfaction and forces us on to
other paths. This may be wrong—it is hard to decide” (p. 41). Wrong or not,
this speculation governs the rest of Civilization and Its Discontents. In the
footnote quoted from a moment ago and to which this sentence refers us,
Freud is already trying to define that unsatisfactory something in the nature
of sexuality itself. He comes up with three factors: the organic repression of
our sense of smell and of anal eroticism (this is the conjecture “that goes
deepest”), our inherent bisexuality (which means, he writes, that the same
object is not likely to satisfy both our male and female desires) and finally
that “degree of direct aggression” with which “erotic relations are so often
associated . . . quite apart from the sadistic component that properly belongs
to them” (p. 43).
Thus begins the reflection on aggression—the real and profound subject
of Civilization and Its Discontents, a subject which, from section V to VIII,
will be promoted to the upper body of the text. To use the image from Romain
Rolland which Freud has analyzed in section I, aggression is the oceanic ele-
ment that will flood the text of Civilization and Its Discontents—with, how-
ever, a crucial distinction. If the footnotes play the role of the psychoanalytic
unconscious in this work, the material of the footnotes will be allowed into
the text proper—into the quite proper text—only if its sexual components
are expunged. And so, enacting compositionally his own formulation of the
laws of repression and symptom-formation, Freud will devote the rest of his
symptomatic upper text to the analysis of a presumably nonerotic aggression.
Nowhere is the troubled speculative mobility of Civilization and Its Discon-
tents more evident than in Freud’s ultimately failed attempt to maintain the
distinction between sexuality and aggression. The text’s “official” version of
the aggressive drive is that it “is the descendant and principal representative
of the death drive, which we have found beside Eros and which rules the
world jointly with him.” The reference is of course to the thesis of Beyond
the Pleasure Principle (1920), and as in that work Freud maintains here “the
ubiquity of non-erotic aggression and destruction,” at the same time that
he recognizes, once again, that the death drive, from which that destruc-
tion derives, “mostly eludes our perception, of course unless it is tinged with
eroticism.” But now Freud goes further: “Yet even where it appears without
any sexual purpose, in the blindest destructive fury, there is no mistaking the
fact that its satisfaction is linked with an extraordinarily high degree of narcis-
sistic enjoyment, in that this satisfaction shows the ego how its old wish for
omnipotence can be fulfilled” (p. 57).
Aggression is beginning to sound bizarrely like—of all things—the oce-
anic feeling, which Freud, correcting the religious emphasis given to that
feeling by Romain Rolland, had defined as an ecstatic breaking down of
the boundaries between the ego and the world traceable to the “unlimited
narcissism” of infancy. Like the oceanic feeling, aggressiveness includes an
intense erotic pleasure. Against the view that the oceanic feeling is the source
of religious sentiments, Freud had argued that it is probably rather “an initial
attempt at religious consolation,” a delusionary cure for human suffering (p.
10). Now, however, Freud is suggesting that we suffer because civilization in-
sists that we curb the “extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment”
that accompanies satisfied aggression (that is, the successful breaking down
of the world’s resistances to, or more fundamentally, differences from, the
ego). The oceanic feeling is the cure that religion proposes for the suffering
caused by the curbing of the oceanic feeling—which is to say that the pro-
posed cure for the illness is an idealized repetition of its origin. The oceanic
feeling is a benign reformulation of “the blindest destructive fury” (p. 57).
This mystification, however, points to a hidden truth about destructive-
ness: it is identical with love. Not only had Freud spoken, in the final foot-
note to section IV, of “a degree of direct aggression” so often associated with
erotic relations; not only does he recognize, as we have just seen, the intense
narcissistic pleasure of destructiveness; he had even gone so far as to assert
in section V, in objecting to the communists’ argument that private property
created aggression, that the latter “forms the basis of all affectionate and lov-
ing relations among human beings, with perhaps the one exception of the
relation between the mother and her male child” (p. 50). If we abolished
the family and instituted complete sexual freedom, the indestructible de-
structiveness of human beings would still be with us. Only a few pages after
Freud’s very tentative suggestion at the end of section IV that “something
inherent in the [sexual] function itself” (p. 41) may prevent complete sexual
happiness, he claims, without any tentativeness at all (even while continuing

to insist on the nonerotic character of this aggressiveness), that an aggressive
destructiveness “forms the basis of” (p. 50) human love—which, I suggest,
may be another way of saying that destructiveness is constitutive of sexuality.
The explicit argument of Civilization and Its Discontents goes like this: we
must sacrifice part of our sexuality and sublimate it into brotherly love in or-
der to control our murderous impulses towards others. But the text obliquely
yet insistently reformulates this argument in the following way: human love
is something like an oceanic aggressiveness which threatens to shatter civili-
zation in the wake of its own shattering narcissistic pleasure. We don’t move
from love to aggression in Civilization and Its Discontents; rather, love is
redefined, re-presented, as aggressiveness.
Not only that: civilization itself repeats, rather than opposes, the other
two terms, thereby transforming the argument of Freud’s work into a triple
tautology: sexuality = aggression = civilization. It is by no means certain
that civilization can maintain itself as a distinct term within what might be
called the oceanic textuality of Civilization and Its Discontents, a textuality
that breaks down the boundaries separating concepts. I referred at the begin-
ning of this discussion to Freud’s dissatisfaction, expressed several times in
Civilization and Its Discontents, with the ordinariness of his own ideas. He
claims to be painfully aware of discovering nothing, in this investigation,
“that is not generally known” (p. 24) It is only in the middle of section VII
that Freud finally announces an idea worthy of a new science, a new way
of thinking about the human mind. “And here at last an idea comes in that
belongs entirely to psychoanalysis and is foreign to our ordinary way of think-
ing.” What is that idea? It tells us, Freud continues, that while “it is at first
the conscience . . . that causes us to renounce the drives, this causal relation
is later reversed. Every renunciation of the drives now becomes a dynamic
source of conscience; every fresh renunciation reinforces its severity and in-
tolerance.” And Freud declares himself “tempted to endorse the paradoxical
statement that conscience results from [rather than is the cause of] the re-
nunciation of the drives” (p. 65). It would seem, then, that paradox is central
to psychoanalytic thinking. There is, however, something troubling in the
fact that Civilization and Its Discontents has been dealing in paradoxes long
before Freud announced the arrival of an idea worthy of psychoanalysis. We
have learned, for example, that the more virtuous a man is the more severe
is his superego, and that he blames himself for misfortunes for which he is
clearly not responsible. Such paradoxes may be at first puzzling, but they are
resolvable. To renounce satisfaction of a drive is not to renounce the desire
associated with the drive; the frustration of a desire increases its intensity,
and so saints, Freud remarks, are not so wrong to call themselves sinners:
frustrated temptations are inescapable temptations.
Freud moves on, however, to say something quite different: renunciation
itself produces conscience. The more familiar view, Freud reminds us, is
that “the original aggression of the conscience continues the severity of the
external authority and has therefore nothing to do with renunciation” (p.
65). But internalization turns out to have two very different aspects. On the
one hand, the authority becomes an internal watch-dog and is thereby able
to continue to exercise its prohibitive functions. Civilization thus inhibits
aggression by sending it back where it came from; conscience, or the super-
ego, treats the ego with the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would
like to direct towards others. On the other hand, Freud tells us, external
authority—civilization and its representatives—is internalized in order to
be attacked. The authority’s imagined aggression toward the desiring subject
is taken over by the subject, not only to discipline desire but also in order
to attack the authority itself. The subject-ego is being punished for its guilty
desires, but the punishing energy is taken from the subject’s fury at the agent
of punishment, who in fact also becomes its object. The child is showing the
father what a good punishing father he, the child, would be, but since it is
aggression towards the father which allows for this instructive demonstration,
the object of it is bound to be the father, “degraded,” as Freud says, to sitting
in for or as the child in the punished ego. This ferociously severe conscience
is already present within the renounced instinctual drives. We no longer have
the paradox of virtue intensifying the reproaches of conscience, a paradox
explained, and dissolved, by the role of secret desires compensating for the
renounced behavior. Now we are not speaking of degrees of guilt or of moral
severity but rather of an aggressiveness that accompanies renounced desire.
The external authority’s severe demands on the subject are fused with the
subject’s vengeful anger at those demands, both of which constitute the sub-
ject’s renunciation: the consequence, and the content, of renunciation are a
doubly reinforced conscience.
What has happened to civilization? More pertinently, what is civiliza-
tion? What does it mean to say that civilization inhibits aggression or to as-
sert, as Freud does in his concluding section, that “the sense of guilt [is] the
most important problem in the development of civilization and the price
we pay for cultural progress is a loss of happiness, arising from a heightened
sense of guilt” (p. 71)? The text has by now made a quite different argu-
ment: the renunciation of aggression is inherent in its constitution. But it is a
renunciation that multiplies the force of aggression. In giving up the satisfac-

tion of a drive, we simultaneously: (1) internalize the authority presumably
inhibiting the drive, (2) increase our sense of guilt by intensifying our desire
for satisfaction, (3) submit the ego to the fury of an aggressiveness originally
intended for the inhibiting external authority. Given the limitations of our
effective power over the external world, it could be said that the curbing of
aggressiveness offers the only realistic strategy for satisfying aggressiveness.
And the inhibiting power of what Freud calls civilization is unintelligible—if
we exclude the crudest exercise of power, in which people are physically sub-
jected to the will of others—except in terms of those internal mechanisms
that I have just outlined. In a very important sense, civilization in Freud, at
least that aspect of it which he thinks of as a socialized superego, is merely
a cultural metaphor for the psychic fulfilment in each of us of a narcissisti-
cally thrilling wish to destroy the world, a wish “fulfilled” in a monstrously
ingenious phantasmatic scenario of self-destruction. From this perspective,
civilization is not the tireless if generally defeated opponent of individual
aggressiveness; rather, it is the cause of the very antagonism that Civilization
and Its Discontents sets out to examine. The regulator of aggression is identi-
cal to the very problem of aggression.
We have moved very far indeed from an optimistic view of sexuality’s
beneficent influence on the individual as well as on civilization. A more
liberal sexual ethic would, Freud suggested in “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality
and Modern Nervous Illness,” make individuals happier, help to preserve the
institution of marriage, and free the mental energy indispensable to artistic
and scientific achievement. This is a psychoanalytic program closer to Wil-
helm Reich than to Freud; it is psychoanalysis in the service of a gospel of
sexual liberation. For the Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents, sexuality
is certainly as important as it was in 1908, but there has been a momentous
shift of perspective: now sexuality is the ineradicable, intractable source of
our unhappiness. And this view implies a distinction—absent from the ear-
lier essay—between sex and sexuality. In the first few sections of Civilization
and Its Discontents, Freud seems to be talking about certain kinds of behavior
that would make the individual happy but that civilization prohibits. By the
end of section IV, we are dealing with something quite different. Not only
is the behavior that would make us happy a monstrous anomaly (remember
that prehistoric sniffing male on all fours), but now we are being asked to look
at a psychic “function,” at something like a fundamental psychic posture
towards the world. We may, with Freud, call that posture sexuality, but it has
very little to do with sex. We may, also with Freud, wish to call it aggression,
but this is an aggression of enormous erotic power, an aggression that may

even be constitutive of sexuality.
It should at once be said that this blurring of distinctions is by no means
what Freud the rational thinker wants. Indeed, the opposition advanced in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle between Eros and Thanatos (between, on
the one hand, sexuality, and on the other, aggression and a death drive)—
an opposition that Freud unreservedly reasserts in Civilization and Its
Discontents—might even be thought of as an anticipatory theoretical defense
against the collapse of that very dualism into a nearly inconceivable same-
ness. Freud resolutely holds on to the notion of a nonerotic aggression at the
same time that his argument moves inexorably towards a view of aggression
(directed towards the world or towards the self) as intense erotic excitement.
The latter view is the language of psychoanalysis, although it is a language at
odds with what language usually does. It abolishes the differences and spaces
that separate terms and concepts; it transforms oppositions into repetitions,
and threatens to reduce discourse to a numbing display of redundancies.
This is not to say that such redundancies cover all of reality. Psychoanalysis
is not about all of reality; it treats, properly, “only” sexuality (and its detrac-
tors are right about this), but the sexuality it treats is a kind of vast tautology
within the human psyche, one to which what we call the sexual act is nearly
irrelevant. Psychoanalysis teaches us to recognize that tautology as an always
imminent threat to our negotiations with the differences and the nonredun-
dant spaces of the authentically nonerotic real.2
In terms of a particular life’s history, the psychic posture just described
accounts for our never losing anything. In psychoanalysis, nothing is ever for-
gotten, given up, left behind. In section I of Civilization and Its Discontents,
Freud claims that “in mental life, nothing that has once taken shape can be
lost,” and, soon after this, “everything past survives” (pp. 7, 9). Everything
persists; psychoanalysis classifies the modalities of persistence and return:
conscious memory, slips-of-the-tongue, repression, symptomatic behavior,
acting out, sublimation. Civilization and Its Discontents textually confirms
this law. It wanders, and Freud appears to have trouble finding his subject
(the function of religion, the conditions of happiness, the nature of civiliza-
tion, erotic and nonerotic drives, the aetiology of conscience). And yet ag-
gressiveness comes to include everything: it is accompanied by an intense
2. Ulysse Dutoit and I attempt to show what such exchanges with the world might be like (sensual
exchanges that at once acknowledge and dismiss the erotic) in both Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett,
Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) and Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
erotic pleasure; like the oceanic feeling discussed in section I, it breaks down
the boundaries between the self and the world; it gives expression both to
instinctual needs and, in the form of conscience, to the inhibiting energy of
civilization. Psychoanalysis does not deny the world’s existence, but it does
document the procedures by which the mind dematerializes the world, ab-
sorbs it into a history of fantasy-representations. To complain, for example, as
critics have done, that Freud turned away from the real world and studied the
seduction of children only as fantasy is like complaining about astronomers
turning their analytic attention to the stars. Psychoanalysts are no more and
no less capable than anyone else of recognizing such phenomena as real
child abuse, but that recognition is irrelevant to what is “psychoanalytic” in
psychoanalysis. It may not, however, be irrelevant to suggest the very limited
usefulness of psychoanalysis in describing, or training us for, what I called a
moment ago our negotiations with the nonerotic real. Lacan’s assaults on ego
psychology can be best justified as a profound fidelity to psychoanalysis itself,
as a recognition that a psychology of adaptation to the world is by definition
a nonpsychoanalytic psychology. Psychoanalysis gives a persuasive account
not of human adjustment but of that which makes us unfit for civilized life.
This should at the very least cast some doubt on the validity of any notion of
a psychoanalytic “cure.” The clinical practice of psychoanalysis is grounded
in a theory that tells us why we can’t be cured. The “illness” in question takes
on great anecdotal variety in individual lives (and this naturally provides
ample material for clinical work), but our blind destructive fury is an intrac-
table psychic function, and positioning in the world, rather than a deviation
from some (imaginary) psychic normality. We can, at best (as long as we
remain within psychoanalysis), adapt to that which makes us incapable of
adaptation. To go any further (again, within psychoanalysis) would be to cure
ourselves of being human.
9
Fr-oucault and the End of Sex
Foucault and Freud: a large part of my work has been a dialogue (both
conciliatory and antagonistic) between the two. It is in the agitated space
between Foucault and psychoanalysis that I have been trying to think gay-
ness and, more generally, desire and sexuality. At first, having worked with
psychoanalytic texts before I became absorbed in Foucault’s work, I couldn’t
help but find regrettable Foucault’s unwillingness to enter into something
like a sustained dialogue with psychoanalysis. Questions that he himself
raised—principally on the nature of disciplinary networks and on the pos-
sibilities of resistance to (and from within) those networks—seemed to me
incapable of being effectively addressed without taking into account such
psychoanalytic concepts as repression and the unconscious. This was not
merely an abstract objection. I felt, for example (and I continue to feel), that
the social problem of homophobia can be only superficially understood with-
out those concepts. In “Is the Rectum a Grave?” I suggest that the struggle
against homophobia is doomed to failure if we ignore the psychic yearn-
ings and anxieties that sustain homophobia. For many heterosexual men
(the major source of homophobic persecution), homophobia has been a dis-
placed, more “acceptable” form of misogyny. It is the symptom of a fascina-
tion with and terror of the ego-disintegrating jouissance of a fantasized female
sexuality—a jouissance available to the male body, according to this fantasy,
in “passive” anal sex. Thus Foucault’s claim, in interviews for Salmagundi
Lecture given at the University of California—Berkeley at the symposium “Foucault at Berke-

ley / Twenty Years Later,” October 2004.
f r - o u c a u lt a n d t h e e n d o f s e x | 134
and Mec, that what people find intolerable in gayness is not the sex act but
the spectacle of postcoitum happy gays could strike me only as bizarrely
simplistic. After all, the scene Foucault describes (one he probably saw many
times on the streets of the Castro in the gloriously sex-wild pre-AIDS days
of the late 1970s in San Francisco) is hardly a gay prerogative. Millions of
straight couples look just as happy after a good fuck, and now that gays are
anxiously rushing to take matrimonial vows, it is likely that they will look just
as unhappy, or bored, as countless straight couples after five or ten years of
monogamous intimacy.
And yet it was this simplistic, easily derided view of homophobia that
helped to dampen my enthusiasm for psychoanalytic interpretations. First
of all, Foucault’s reductive comment is of course deliberately, strategically
polemical. More important, it is the result of his conviction, which may have
been more of a hope, that gays might invent less oppressive lifestyles (intima-
cies as well as more general social relations no longer structured by fixed posi-
tions of dominance and submission, of superiority and inferiority)—in short
that we might become models for what he called “new relational modes.”
My book Homos is a difficult balancing act between a lingering allegiance
to psychoanalysis and my growing conviction that psychoanalysis will not
be very useful in helping us to reconfigure relationality. And this is not only
because (as Didier Eribon has argued with great force) psychoanalysis may
be irrevocably committed to a normativizing sexual ethic. Perhaps even more
significantly, what I have come to think of as the most invaluable aspect of
psychoanalytic thought is inherently inhospitable to the admittedly utopic
but no less indispensable goal of “new relational modes.” I’m thinking of
the drive to destroy—to destroy both the world and the self—which Freud,
especially in Civilization and Its Discontents, defines as intractable because it
is also the source of the most intense pleasure we can know. As such, destruc-
tive jouissance would be resistant, as Freud claims, to any social transforma-
tions whatsoever. A question that interests me very much is: is it possible to
invent “new relational modes” while taking into account the intractability
of the death drive?
It’s true that Foucault himself didn’t go very far in defining what those
“new relational modes” might be like. I actually find this to be a beneficial
limitation, since more specific suggestions about, as he put it, how we might
“become gay” could operate as a constraint on our very effort to do so, while
his underconceptualizing of that notion can serve as a generous inspiration,
leaving the field open for all sorts of experiences and experiments. My recent
collaborative work with Ulysse Dutoit on the visual arts could be thought of
as speculative experiments inspired by Foucault’s interest in relational in-

novation. Caravaggio’s Secrets, in particular, moves from a psychoanalytic
reading of what we call the erotic invitation in Caravaggio’s early portraits of
provocatively seductive boys to an analysis of a relational field that proposes
a kind of pleasure different from the jouissance associated with sexual desire
(and sexualized aggression). Caravaggio’s Secrets is an antipsychoanalytic
study in the sense that it proposes the relational foundation for a sensual plea-
sure that has renounced, or gone beyond, the exciting mysteries of desire.
Thus, in our analyses of paintings we repeat, in our own terms, Foucault’s
distinction between desire and pleasure. We find in Caravaggio’s work, in
opposition to the psychoanalytic insistence on the lack inherent in desire,
visual representations of the pleasures of perceiving partial self-replications,
everywhere. In sum, an erotics of presence and plenitude rather than one
based on efforts to appropriate and to find our pleasure in that which we lack.
The connection to Foucault is even more pronounced in that the pleasure
we speak of is at once an aesthetic phenomenon (produced by the perception
of formal correspondences between the subject and the world) and an effect
of a certain ascesis (of a work on and, to a certain extent, against the self ).
Ascesis and aesthetics: two terms central to Foucault’s elaboration, in History
of Sexuality of a souci de soi, en ethic of the self, in Greco-Roman antiquity.
And yet: another reading of Foucault for a seminar I gave at Northwestern
University a few years ago unexpectedly reilluminated psychoanalysis for me
and even brought Freud and Foucault in an at least temporarily harmoni-
ous reencounter. With an obvious antipsychoanalytic intention, Foucault
announces, in the first sentence of chapter 3, part 4, of volume 1 of History
of Sexuality that “sexuality must not be described as a stubborn drive. . . . ”
Instead, “it is the name that can be given to a historical construct . . . a great
surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of
pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special kinds of
knowledge, the strengthening of controls and resistances are linked to one
another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power.”
Even more original, and this time somewhat bizarre, is Foucault’s insistence,
in the final section of the same volume, on the nonexistence of sex. There is
an important distinction here: sexuality exists as strategic deployments, but
those deployments depend on the invention of “sex in itself” as “the center
around which sexuality distributes its effects.” Sex is nothing more than “the
most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of
sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their
forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures.” Nothing, it would appear, erases
more effectively the entire field of psychoanalysis than this affirmation of sex
as the myth required to support a historical construct named sexuality.
We read some Freud in the same seminar, and it was perhaps his textual
proximity to Foucault that led us to the startling conclusion that, proceed-
ing from wholly different analyses, Freud comes to nearly the same conclu-
sion as Foucault. That is, the founder of psychoanalysis also erased sex from
the human body. The entire text of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexual-
ity deploys sexuality as a construction: it defines the stages—oral, anal, and
phallic—through which the human subject must pass in order to reach the
goal of normative genitality. But after so carefully tracing the presumably
necessary development of sexuality in the child, Freud comes to the aston-
ishing “unsatisfactory conclusion” in the final sentence of his book that we
know so little about “the essence of sexuality” that in fact we cannot construct
a theory “adequate to the understanding alike of normal and pathological
conditions.” But this is exactly what, until that final sentence, Three Essays
has more or less confidently been doing: constructing a theory of the normal
and pathological conditions of sexuality. Reread in a Foucaldian perspective,
Freud’s work has been doing something quite different. Three Essays has
deployed the guidelines for a therapeutic discipline. It has both provided a
content for sexual development and structured that content as a teleological
narrative. But Freud exposes that narrative as pure construction by acknowl-
edging the absence, or at the very least the unknowability, of, to paraphrase
Foucault, the ideal point made necessary by his own deployment of sexual
development. (Add to this the fact that within the text itself sex becomes a
property of the entire body—of the skin and of internal organs—and sexual
pleasure can be triggered by such things as reading and riding in trains.) The
validity of that deployment, of that narrative, depends on there being a know-
able “sexual essence”—a biological referent that Foucault calls “sex.” It is as
if in the main narrative thrust of the essay Freud was confirming his role in
the history of those strategies of knowledge and power that Foucault called
sexuality; but then he moves from being one of the cultural “objects” demys-
tified by Foucault’s analysis to becoming himself one of its demystifiers. Thus
psychoanalysis anticipates and performs Foucault’s deconstruction of it. Has
Freud anticipatorily mutated into Foucault? In any case, when we add to
this astonishing self-defeating move the collapse of sex into the jouissance of
aggression twenty-five years later in Civilization and Its Discontents, we may
feel justified in arguing that Freud initiated Foucault’s major enterprise of
what might be called corporeal clearance—that is, stripping the body of its
imposed and unnecessary sexual identity and presenting it as a marvelously
variegated surface of flesh available to as yet unarticulated pleasures sup-

pressed and crippled by the at once authorized and prohibited excitement of
something called sex.
But why return to Freud by way of Foucault if it is only to read Foucault
as Freud? First of all, Foucault can help us to see—in spite of himself—that
psychoanalysis, which he certainly considered, as most queer theorists do to-
day, as operating a massive reinforcement of old relational modes, in fact may
have cleared the field—in spite of itself—for “new relational modes.” At the
same time, however, psychoanalysis powerfully argues against the illusion
that new ways of structuring relations can simply be “performed,” that they
depend on our consciously choosing them—an illusion nourished, involun-
tarily or deliberately, by some early queer texts. The possibility of inventing
new forms of intimacy and perhaps even new modes of pleasure must, I
believe, take into account that intractable resistance to life that Freud called
the death drive—and that Jean Laplanche has identified with sexuality itself
in Freud. In political life, the promotion of murderous projects can perhaps
be explained in terms of ego-motives, but the more or less passive support
of, and therefore collaboration with, those projects on the part of millions
of people who have no self-interest in their fulfillment can be understood
only in terms of a perhaps universal, and incurable, drive to destroy. In other
words, while there can be no excuse for not struggling against the multiple
forms of oppression, psychoanalysis teaches us (against a certain naive com-
placency about the effectiveness of political reform) that there is never only
an opposition between the oppressor and the oppressed, and that we are all,
so to speak, oppressed by the appeal of murderous jouissance.
The complacency I refer to has often justified itself by a serious misread-
ing of Foucault. In fact, the psychoanalytic death drive can bring us back—
in a penultimate turn of the screw—to those aspects of Foucault that provide
a nonpsychoanalytic and yet persuasive account of how new relational modes
can be blocked. They will always be blocked, more or less successfully, by
the drive to power inherent in movement itself. Remember that for Foucault
power is not simply something exercised by those “in power,” those who ex-
ercise power; rather, power is “omnipresent,” “immanent” in all “types of re-
lationships,” it is “produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or
rather in every relation from one point to another.” In a sense, power, as well
as the inevitable resistances to power internal to its movement (resistances
are the “irreducible opposite” of power, the “odd” terms that can deflect
and reorient the always mobile trajectories of power)—all this, power and
resistances to power, is the mobile energetics of life itself. In more concrete
terms, Foucault thus implies that the frictions, the inherent antagonisms
and oppositions of power, can never be eliminated from social groupings,
and that they must therefore be allowed their place in any project of social
reorganization. Power operates relationally; there is no relationality without
power. This kinetic ontology of power is the Foucaldian version of intracta-
bility, an intractability defined more fully, and more satisfactorily for me, by
the psychoanalytic appeal to unconscious drives. So to schematize in over-
simplified fashion this dizzying back and forth movement between Foucault
and psychoanalysis, let’s say that psychoanalysis “needs” Foucault’s utopic
call for “new relational modes,” while Foucault “needs” the psychic density
within which, in terms psychoanalysis has made available to us, jouissance
always risks corrupting pleasure.
For my final move—or at least my most recent one—I want to suggest
that a psychoanalytically conceived unconscious can be not only the source
of the risks I just mentioned, but also a collaborator in the extensions of
pleasure and the rethinking of relationality. This would mean enlisting the
unconscious in the service of “new relational modes.” The body, once it is
relieved of the burden of sex and especially of the prejudicial view of lack as
constitutive of desire (and of our relation to the world), can, in its openness to
the world, be the site of an inscription of the unconscious. Is a Foucaldian re-
thinking of the unconscious possible? It could be maintained that Lacan has
prepared the way for this project, especially in connection with his attempt
to dissociate psychoanalysis from a depth psychology. The unconscious, La-
can argues, is between perception and consciousness. To speculate on this
proposal (which I would locate somewhere between Freud and Foucault)
might be the start of a reconstruction of subjectivity (a task more general, and
more radical, than the delineation of a so-called gay subjectivity) on which
all effective political reconstructions ultimately depend.
10
Psychoanalysis and the

Aesthetic Subject
We are neither present in the world nor absent from it. The intelligibility
of this assertion will depend on our success in redefining the usual refer-
ent of “we,” a success made problematic by the fact that the redefining
agency is a function of the very object—or, more properly, subject—to
be redefined. We may, however, be encouraged by the thought that both
art and psychoanalysis offer ample evidence of the human subject’s ap-
titude for exceeding its own subjectivity. By that I mean an aptitude for
modes of subjecthood in excess of or to the side of the psychic particu-
larities that constitute individualizing subjectivities. Only those modes of
subject-being can both recognize and initiate correspondences between
the subject and the world that are free of both an antagonistic dualism
between human consciousness and the world it inhabits and the anthropo-
morphic appropriation of that world. While it seems to me that the most
profound originality of psychoanalysis has been that it demands of itself a
conceptual account of such correspondences, I also feel that it has largely
evaded that demand by misinterpreting itself as a depth psychology. The
depsychologizing of psychoanalysis—implicit in Freud and reinitiated,
most notably, by Lacan—is imperative if psychoanalysis is to be more than
the therapeutically oriented classification of the human subject’s failed
communications with the world.
If psychoanalysis invites us to think a register of being radically different
from a subjectivity grounded in psychology (it calls that other mode of being
Originally published in Critical Inquiry 32 (Winter 2006): 161–74.

p s y c h oa n a l y s i s a n d t h e a e s t h e t i c s u b j e c t | 140
the unconscious), it has also, for the most part, failed to see how that discov-
ery reconfigures the subject in ways that open us to the solidarity of being
both among human subjects and between the human and the nonhuman.
It is this failure that accounts most profoundly for the limitations of psycho-
analytically inspired approaches to art. Psychoanalysis describes our aptitude
for transforming the world into a reflection of subjectivity. It has treated the
work of art as a double model of subjectification: a privileged representation,
in its contents, of subjectifying strategies as well as an exemplification, in its
structural and stylistic enunciations, of the artist’s subjectifying resources.
Psychoanalysis has been the most authoritative modern reformulation of
the Cartesian and the Hegelian opposition (qualified by Hegel as “neces-
sary absolutely”) between Nature and Spirit or between the res extensa and
thought. The clinical subject of psychoanalysis successfully strips (I quote
from Hegel) “the external world of its inflexible foreignness [in order to]
enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization of himself,” in order
to find again “his own characteristics,” which Hegel attributes to the “free
subject.” Thanks to the ruses of desire, the psychoanalytic subject lives what
Hegel defined as “the really beautiful subject-matter of romantic art”: the
emergence of subjectivity from itself “into a relation with something else
which, however, is its own, and in which it finds itself again and remains
communing and in unity with itself.”1
The projective, introjective, and identificatory techniques first studied by
Freud are strategies designed to suppress the otherness in which my same-
ness is hidden from my consciousness. To paraphrase an author who made
of this war between subject and object a gloriously lurid psychic drama (I
refer to Melanie Klein), I must impose my good objects on the world in
order to prevent the world from destroying me with my bad objects. For
Klein, it is the bad object that gives birth to the object as object; the latter is
originally constituted in the human subject. From the very beginning, the
object as conceived by psychoanalysis is inherently a bad object, or a fun-
damentally foreign object that I must struggle to appropriate, or, finally, an
object in whose depths the subject risks discovering his own psychic wastes.
“At the very beginning, it seems,” Freud writes in the 1915 essay “Instincts
and Their Vicissitudes,” “the external world, objects, and what is hated are
identical.” Not only at the very beginning: “As an expression of the reaction
of unpleasure evoked by objects,” he goes on, hate “always remains in an
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1975), 1:465,
31, 533.
intimate relation with the self-preservative instincts.”2 Given the (perceived)

fundamental hostility of the world to the self, the very possibility of object
relations depends on a profound mistrust of the object and, consequently, on
different modes of appropriating objects.
“It is obvious,” Lacan writes in the 1959–60 seminar on The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis,
that the libido, with its paradoxical, archaic, so-called pre-genital character-
istics, with its eternal polymorphism, with its world of images that are linked
to the different sets of drives associated with the different stages from the oral
to the anal to the genital—all of which no doubt constitutes the originality
of Freud’s contribution—that whole microcosm has absolutely nothing to do
with the macrocosm; only in fantasy does it engender world.
Lacan goes on to say: “This is a point whose importance does not seem to
have been noticed, namely, that the Freudian project has caused the whole
world to reenter us, has definitely put it back in its place, that is to say, in
our body, and nowhere else.”3 Having removed the desiring subject from the
world, and having relocated the world within the subject, Lacanian theory
would seem to have nothing to say about the world as such or about the sub-
ject’s presence in that world. But this is not exactly the case. Lacan relocates
the subject—or at least parts of the subject—in the world, not as projections,
but rather as that which has been detached, cut off from the subject, as a re-
sult of our entrance into language as signification; we are in the world as the
psychic dropping that will be identified with the objet petit a. In Lacanian
aesthetics, especially as outlined in the ethics seminar, beauty, or form, is
what protects us from the objet petit a, that is, from the unacceptable, hid-
den, lost cause of our desires. “The function of beauty,” Lacan announces
in the essay “Kant avec Sade,” is to be “an extreme barrier that forbids ac-
cess to a fundamental horror.”4 It is this invisible, literally unspeakable pres-
ence that gives to beauty its blinding brilliance, the seductive and protective
shining of form.
Thus, psychoanalytically conceived, the world interests us, seduces
us, even dazzles us to the degree that it contains us—whether it be as a
2. Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915), The Standard Edition of the Complete
Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953–74), 14:136, 139.
3. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, vol. 7 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
trans. Denis Porter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York, 1992), p. 92.
4. Lacan, “Kant avec Sade,” Écrits (Paris, 1966), p. 776; my trans.
projection, an identification, or an original loss. We might note in passing

that the relational mechanisms studied most thoroughly by psychoanalysis—
identification, projection, introjection—could perhaps only have been theo-
rized in a civilization that has privileged an appropriative relation of the
self to the world, one that assumes a secure and fundamentally antagonistic
distinction between subject and object. I want to ask the following ques-
tion: can the work of art, contrary to psychoanalytic assumptions, deploy
signs of the subject in the world that are not signs of interpretation or of
an object-destroying jouissance, signs of what I will call correspondences of
forms within a universal solidarity of being? What I have tried to show in my
work on psychoanalysis and art and especially in work done in collaboration
with Ulysse Dutoit—in studies of art as diverse as ancient Assyrian sculpture,
Plato’s Symposium, Caravaggio’s painting, Proust’s literary monument, Mark
Rothko’s and Ellsworth Kelly’s art, and the films of Resnais and Godard—has
been how art can in effect position us as aesthetic rather than psychoanalyti-
cally defined subjects within the world.
Our notion of correspondences has been elaborated almost entirely through
studies of the visual arts. That is to say, certain perceptual recognitions—ours,
and, it has seemed to us, those of the artists we have discussed—have pro-
vided the evidence for our argument for the human subject’s nonprojective
presence in the world. Our fundamental claim has been that the aesthetic
subject, while it both produces and is produced by works of art, is a mode of
relational being that exceeds the cultural province of art and embodies truths
of being. Art diagrams universal relationality. How might that relationality
be diagrammed in literary works? Pierre Michon’s 1996 novel La Grande
Beune begins by locating itself in a comfortably familiar Balzacian fashion:
“Between les Martres and Saint-Amand-le-Petit lies the town of Castelnau,
along the Beune [river]. I was posted to Castelnau in 1961.”5 As we learn
in the first pages, the narrator was twenty years old in 1961, and it was at a
small public school in Castelnau that that he had his first teaching position.
He lodges at the town’s only hotel, Chez Hélène; its proprietress, Hélène,
is a widow whose son, called Jean-le-Pêcheur, is, as his name suggests, the
region’s most renowned fisherman. The place is unremarkable except in
two respects: it is an area famous for its prehistoric caves (among them, Las-
caux), and the woman who runs the local shop where the young teacher buys
cigarettes and postcards is a beauty he describes as “a nice piece” (un beau
morceau), an animal and a queen, a beauty who instantly makes “abominable
5. Pierre Michon, The Origin of the World, trans. Wyatt Alexander Mason (San Francisco, 2002),
p. 3; hereafter abbreviated OW.
thoughts” run through his blood (OW, p. 12). He immediately desires this
radiant specimen in terms remarkably free of the romantic idealization one
might expect from an ordinary twenty-year-old: “I gutted her” (Je l’étripais) is
his concise formulation of his erotic fantasies about her (OW, p. 25). His in-
terest in Yvonne remains silent, perhaps especially because he discovers—or
infers—that she is having an affair with another, older, man. Not only that:
surprising her returning home, or so he assumes, from an assignation with
her lover, he notices bruises on her neck and concludes that she enjoys and
suffers from her lover’s violence, that her entire, splendidly white body is
inscribed with the dark welts inflicted by the lashes of her beloved’s whip.
This discovery, or sadomasochistic fable, far from repelling him, inflames
the young man’s passion even more. One day the narrator and Mado—a
young woman with whom he is having a considerably more banal sexual
relation—are taken on a tour of one of the less known prehistoric caves.
Their guide is Jeanjean, whom the narrator recognizes as the man he had
judged, by the way he and Yvonne had once exchanged a few words in her
tobacco shop, to be her cruel, happy lover. The main attraction of the cave
they visit, much to Mado’s slightly exasperated amusement, is a room with
completely blank walls. The short novel ends with an account of how the
narrator, in his frustration at not being able amorously to torture Yvonne, mis-
treats her seven-year-old son, one of his students, and, on the final pages, with
a description of the rare carp—not the usual scaly kind of fish, but rather the
unusual leather-carp without scales, smooth as water, shimmering, and with
completely bare skin—that Jean-le-Pêcheur proudly brings to his mother’s
inn one evening. The narrator compares the capture of this precious fish to
the mythic capture of “queens that are carp from their bellies down” and who
“are surprised in their baths by an ardent man,” one who might threaten to
lift them from their pool as the narrator imagines Jeanjean, at the same mo-
ment, raising and lowering an ecstatically submissive Yvonne from and back
into the water of her bath, Yvonne accepting and announcing to her lover
over and over again her imminent and indefinite death (OW, pp. 83–84).
It would be tempting to read this rather sordid tale as an anatomy of sex-
ual fantasy. Since everything we know about Yvonne is filtered through the
young man’s point of view, she—and the sadomasochistic adventure he at-
tributes to her—exists for us only in his imagination of them. In this reading
of the novel, everything proceeds from a psychic inwardness; the fantasy is so
powerful that it affects the narrator’s entire world. The dead fox hanging on
poles carried by a group of boys, the remnants of prehistoric weapons used
to slaughter animals on display at the back of the classroom, the fish unlucky
enough to be caught on Jean-le-Pêcheur’s hook, the images of wounded

animals on the walls of the region’s caves: everything is contaminated by
the narrator’s brutal sexual obsession. Michon’s work would be a rigorous
demonstration of the way in which what Lacan calls a fundamental fantasy
structures the subject’s perception of the world. More exactly, it demonstrates
the nonexistence of the world from the perspective of a psychoanalytically
defined fantasy. The world is the narrator’s sadomasochistic fantasy; it has
become an immobilized structure that, however frightening it may be, is
also somewhat protective or defensive. The young man’s lurid projections
and displacements shape the world. It is as if reality were, before this psychic
intervention, as blank as the cave wall Jeanjean takes him to. In a sense, the
narrator is as much an artist as the prehistoric men who covered the walls of
other caves in the same region. But, unlike those ancient artists who resur-
rected in their art the recently slaughtered animals whose migration from
the Atlantic coast every spring to the green fields of Auvergne provided food
for their hunters and their families, the narrator writes, or paints, the world
with his desire. Everything becomes an image of Yvonne’s tortured body—
the painted cattle caught leaping in pain, the naively designed martyred St.
Gabriel on the postcard the young man buys in Yvonne’s shop—just as those
images are superimposed on Yvonne herself, whose joyously suffering body
takes on layers of tortured identities. The world thus acquires the stable the-
matic unity, and monotony, of a work of art signed by the narrator’s distinct
desiring fantasy. If there is a beauty in this picture, it is a beauty that emanates
from a certain kind of power, the human power not exactly to satisfy desire
but to see a desire everywhere, to be thrilled by the universal representation
of that which it lacks.
But this aesthetic grounded in control is at once illuminated and threat-
ened by something more terrifying—and perhaps more thrilling—than the
visions of lack that sustain it. Walking through the dark, narrow passages that
lead to the room with unpainted walls, the narrator feels that he is being
breathed on by some invisible beast crawling along the crumbling stones
above them, some “great ambulatory abstraction, chaotic and ready to mani-
fest in the low lamplight . . . the universal miasma with the head of a dead
sheep and the teeth of a wolf, straight ahead and upon you in the shadows
and watching you” (OW, p. 64). This hybrid monstrosity lacks the features
of a desiring fantasy. It is at once an amalgam of animal being and an “idea,”
an abstraction, without any substance whatsoever. It is the horror of undif-
ferentiated being that we can never see but that, always hovering, always
moving with us, never stops looking at us. Deep within our brain there is the
unimaginable imagination of an identityless miasma, of something before

articulated being, which the human can only “think” as before the realiza-
tion of any being whatsoever, as something from which the peace of inor-
ganic stasis, of the death drive fully satisfied, might rescue us. Failing that
salvation, there is the pleasure of negating the world that emerged from the
originary miasma, the pleasure of repainting, of re-creating the world as the
deceptively variegated sameness of our desire.
With each step of our reading so far, we have descended further into the
psyche—moving from the young man’s conscious desire for Yvonne, to a
fantasy about her that he inscribes on the external world, and finally to a
psychic terror of the individual psyche itself being engulfed in a slough of
undifferentiated being. In this cave of interiority, the world as world is left
behind just as surely as it no longer exists in the prehistoric caves where, as
the narrator says, the curious visitors wander in a darkness deeper than the
layers of earth where the dead are buried. And yet I want to propose, against
the reading I’ve just offered, that interiority in La Grande Beune, far from
refashioning the world into the structure of a psychic obsession, is actually
produced by the world. The narrator’s subjectivity is an effect of external
reality. Let’s note first of all that this narrator, of whom we presumably have
the most intimate knowledge, is never named. He is perhaps waiting to be
named, or, to put this in other terms, he may be an empty subject; he is not
exactly, in psychoanalytic terms, a subject without an unconscious, but one
whose unconscious can only come to him from the outside. The narrator
receives from the world the material that will be fashioned into his particular
fantasy of violence. There are the images evoked by the objects in the display
case; there is the postcard representation of a tortured Saint Gabriel; there is
the dead fox carried on poles by boys who, imitating an ancient ritual, dis-
play the fox outside village homes where, repeating an old gesture of grati-
tude to the hunters who rid them of this dangerous animal, the residents will
give something—eggs, a little money—to the young transporters of the dead
fox. And there are above all the scenes reminiscent of the hunt painted on
the walls of the caves the narrator visits with Mado.
Let’s look more closely at the scene with the dead fox. Late one afternoon
the narrator finds only Yvonne’s seven-year-old son taking care of the store.
He rushes out of the village toward the fields and the edge of the woods
where he had often seen Yvonne returning, so he had imagined, from a tryst
with her lover. His frantic searching eyes evoke the phantom Yvonne he had
imagined seeing a thousand times emerging from the forest, in her stock-
ings, her hips naked in the cold, and reminding him of some “big game” (un
gros gibier). It is just at that moment that the boys appear carrying the dead
animal. In the place of the fox, the young man hallucinates Yvonne tied to
the poles and, instead of the fox’s red hair, wet black pubic hair foaming,
he writes, “on the bitch’s thick thighs” (aux cuisses épaisses de cette garce)
(OW, pp. 36, 38). Just then, Yvonne really does come into view, and he
sees the black marks on her cheek and neck that he attributes to her lover’s
expertly handled whip. The scene is the novel’s most extreme example of
a delirious projection that appropriates the world as a setting for a private
fantasy, while at the same time a certain reality distinct from this fantasy
persists, independently but analogously. The substitution of Yvonne for the
dead fox is an erasure of the world as world. When Yvonne appears, it is as
if the private fantasy had to accommodate her real presence (she is part of
the world as world). But the fantasy is of course no longer entirely private.
The word “gibier,” thought before the boys appear, “meets,” by chance, its
objective correlative in the dead fox, to which “gibier” “responds” by invent-
ing a specifically human version of violence: the violence of a sadomasoch-
istic exchange between lovers. The real marks on Yvonne’s cheek and neck
correspond both to and with the fox through the fantasmatic activity that
interprets the marks as inflicted by a whip and extends them down Yvonne’s
hidden body, blackening the dazzlingly white skin of her legs under her
stockings with an extension of the “absolute writing” (l’écriture absolue) just
seen on her face.6
In our work on the visual arts, Ulysse Dutoit and I have been studying film
and painting as documents of a universe of inaccurate replications, of the
perpetual and imperfect recurrences of forms, volumes, colors, and gestures.
We have spoken of these recurrences as evidence of the subject’s presence
everywhere, not as an invasive projection or incorporation designed to elimi-
nate otherness, but rather as an ontological truth about both the absolute
distinctness and the innumerable similitudes that at once guarantee the ob-
jective reality of the world and the connectedness between the world and the
subject. We are born into various families of singularity that connect us to
all the forms that have, as it were, always anticipated our coming, our pres-
ence. I’m now attempting to describe a more specifically psychic version of
these correspondences, one in which desiring fantasies both determine and
are determined by their replications in the world. Successfully realized, this
project might be the basis for a reconciliation of psychoanalysis both with the
world as such and with the aesthetic subjectivity that eschews psychologically
6. Translated by Mason as “absolute authorship.” See Pierre Michon, La Grande Beune (Lagrasse,
1996), p. 50.
motivated communication and replaces such communication with families

of form.
In the passage I’ve just been discussing, except for the momentary sub-
stitution of Yvonne for the fox just before Yvonne appears, the world is not
overwhelmed by fantasy. There is a distinction between what the narrator
imagines and the procession of the schoolboys with the dead fox, and yet it
is difficult to mark a precise boundary between internal and external worlds.
In the regime of correspondences that we have been studying, differences are
inviolable, although they are not governed by or grounded in a fundamen-
tal difference of being between inner and outer. The object never becomes
the subject, and the subject, or the subject’s ego is never, as Freud would
have it, simply the sum of its history of object choices. There is neither a
subject-object dualism nor a fusion of subject and object; there is rather a
kind of looping movement between the two. The world finds itself in the
subject and the subject finds itself in the world. What the world finds in the
subject (in addition to physical correspondences) is a certain activity of con-
sciousness, which partially reinvents the world as it repeats it.
The image of a whiplashed Yvonne is the narrator’s contribution to the
universal singularity of violence inflicted upon living bodies. The ancient
hunt, fishing, the medieval martyr, the slaughtered foxes, war, torture, sa-
domasochistic eroticism: all these scenes, which inaccurately replicate one
another, belong to an enormous transversal cut of being. Taken separately, it’s
true, each one raises specific historical, affective, and ethical questions; onto-
logically considered, however, they delineate the variegated character of one
vast potentiality. Seen in this way, present and past variations on any mode
of being permanently persist because they are not fully; to remember events
is to recognize ourselves in their imaginary presence. From this perspective,
the past is what has passed from the phenomenological to the virtuality of
the imaginary. The past’s disappearance as events is the condition of a new
permanence, the permanent persistence of possibility. The narrator’s cruel
fable about Yvonne is his manner of corresponding with the persistent cut of
violent being that surrounds him; he is the site where different images of vio-
lence intersect. This is the power of the aesthetic subject, fashioning from the
“miasma” of a psyche that, like all human psyches, can be at once everything
and nothing, its individuating responsiveness to the world.
Does this fable give expression to unconscious impulses? In the reading
I’m now proposing, there is no specified unconscious prior to the mate-
rial from the external world in which it at once recognizes and constitutes
itself. The unconscious never is; it is perhaps an essentially unthinkable,
intrinsically unrealizable reserve of human being—a dimension of virtuality

rather than of psychic depth—from which we connect to the world, not as
subject to object, but as a continuation of a specific syntax of being. A con-
tinuation that is also an accretion: the psychic designates its place in the vast
family of stored past and present being by contributing new inscriptions—in
La Grande Beune, the inscription of the young protagonist’s fable of erotic
violence. It is as if the world stimulated the activity of desiring fantasy, not
by lacking objects of desire, but by their very proliferation. The narrator is
excited by the abundance of images of violence, and he implicitly recognizes
their imaginary status by responding to their call, not with an act, but with
other images, the images of fantasy. From this perspective, fantasy is not the
symptom of an adaptive failure. On the contrary, it is the sign of an extremely
attentive, highly individuated response to external reality. It is not the result of
pressure from preexistent, dominant unconscious impulses; the only sense in
which it is revealing about psychic depths is that an intrinsically undifferenti-
ated unconscious provides the material for a psychic composition. Fantasy
is thus on the threshold between an invisible (and necessarily hypothetical)
inner world and the world present to our senses. It is not a symptom to be
cured; rather, it is the principal ontic evidence for an ontological regime of
correspondences in which the discreteness of all things (including human
subjects) is superseded, not by universal fusions, but by the continuation of
all things elsewhere. In this regime, the distinction between inner and outer
is wholly inadequate to describe universal reoccurrence. The human subject
does of course exist and act discretely, separately; but its being exceeds its
bounded subjectivity. There is a perspective on fantasy that would imprison
it within subjectivity. This perspective is consistent with the limited individu-
ality traced by a psychologically defined subject. I’m suggesting something
different: fantasy as a function more of contingent positioning in the world
than of psychic depth.
Furthermore, if fantasy is a major site of our connectedness to the world,
it is not an act that touches or changes the world. It represents the terms in
which the world inheres in the fantasizing subject, terms that can change
as our position in the world changes. An undifferentiated unconscious lends
itself to diverse representations of the interface between the moving sub-
ject and a world whose relational map is itself continuously modified by
the moves of all the units—including the human units—that constitute it.
All these figures do not have the finality of acts that materially modify the
world—such as the actual slaying of a reindeer, the torture of a monk, the
whipping inflicted on Yvonne’s real body. On the contrary, they are the pos-
sibility of the act that may of course precede the act, but that can also follow
the act, when the latter moves back from the real, so to speak, in order to
become always present, permanently imaginary. Psychic fantasy is a type of
unrealized or derealized human and world being, the figure, not for a tak-
ing place, but rather for all taking place—for all relationality—in its pure
inherence. Painting can illuminate this inherence, and it is significant that,
as I have argued elsewhere, for thinkers and artists as different as Caravaggio,
Proust, Heidegger, and Lacan the sign of beauty is a certain brilliance or
shining—as if the disappearance of the material world as object and event
were best figured by an unnatural lighting (one that in Caravaggio is not
projected on objects but seems to come from within objects), a lighting that
signifies a withdrawal from the visible world into the superior visibility of
what has been derealized. Art leads us back from objects, or the actual hunt,
to the vast repertory of virtual being that constitutes what Michon’s narrator
calls the “marvels” that art seeks beyond its own visibility.
Psychoanalysis, with its notion of a subject divided between conscious
thoughts and affects and an atemporal unconscious is, or should be, hospi-
table to the notion I have been tracing of an aesthetic subject. In mental life,
Freud writes in chapter one of Civilization and Its Discontents, “everything
past is preserved.”7 We might reformulate this in the following way: memory
is an illusion of consciousness, as there is no past to remember; instead, there
are innumerable inscriptions of the world that define us by mapping par-
ticular positionings in the world and that simply persist, immanently. These
inscriptions are the world, and they are the subject. While consciousness
continuously forms affectively motivated projects that essentially oppose us
to the world, projects whose satisfaction requires mastery of otherness, we
never cease corresponding unconsciously with that otherness. Mind moves
not only to master the world but also to acknowledge its own reappearances
in the world—that is, the reappearances of itself as self-world. The world
configurations that constitute and individuate a subject wait to be received
by the subject; to put this differently, the subject is in the world before being
born into it. The unconscious is not the region of the mind most hidden from
the world; it resists being known because it so vastly exceeds what might know
it, because it is not of the same order as what might know it. For the most
part, however, psychoanalysis has added depth to classical psychology rather
than elaborating the truly radical notion of a nonsubjective interiority. It is,
I have been arguing, only the latter notion that might speak persuasively of
7. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of
Sigmund Freud, 21:71.
a subject inherently reconciled with the world. The antagonism between

the subject and the world might then be seen as contingent (if, at times,
no less catastrophic) violations of a fundamental correspondence between
the world and subjects, a view significantly different from the more preva-
lent one that posits antagonism as the natural consequence of an irreducible
opposition between subject and object. These are not “merely” theoretical
considerations; human subjects are educated into how they see themselves as
being-in-the-world. Negotiating difference has been the dominant relational
mode in our culture. Such negotiations have primarily consisted in attempts
to overcome or destroy difference or, at best, to tolerate it. Our most liberal
injunction has been: learn to communicate (or pretend to communicate)
with a world where differences practically guarantee failed communications.
We have yet to elaborate the concrete steps (in education, in politics, in the
practice of sociability, in the organization of living spaces) that might help
to erase the hegemony of this relational regime and institute a relationality
grounded in correspondences, in our at-homeness in the world’s being.
Michon’s La Grande Beune is a document of correspondences, a particu-
larly courageous one in that what I have called the cut of being it traces is
perhaps the one most likely to be co-opted by the prejudice of psychic lack,
a prejudice that conveniently justifies invasive appropriations of the world’s
seductive and threatening otherness. The inevitable resistances within the
family of being—resistances inherent in the inaccurately replicative nature
of correspondences—facilitate a certain backtracking into an oppositional,
subject-object relationality. Correspondences do not eliminate frictions, and
frictions can exacerbate the appetite for fusions perhaps endemic to sexual
desire. Psychoanalysis—especially Freud, Laplanche, and Lacan—has pro-
foundly conceptualized the inseparability of jouissance from aggression. Psy-
choanalytically defined sexuality is not a relation; it is the fantasized ecstasy
of a oneness gained by the simultaneous destruction of the self and the world.
This ecstatic destruction of the subject is the most extreme consequence of
a psychological subjectivity, a subjectivity for which the world as lack is an
object of suspicion and of desire. To enter the region of being characterized
by the violence of countless versions of subject-object collision is perhaps
also to be tempted by the psychological derivative of inhabiting that region,
which is sadomasochistic desire. This temptation, inscribed in the language
of La Grande Beune, accounts for the novel’s rich relational indeterminacy.
It would be difficult to eliminate psychological expressiveness from a critical
reading of Michon’s novel. The intense affectivity accompanying the young
man’s fantasies compels us to think of them as expressing and partially satisfy-

ing an otherwise suffocating sadism, at the same time that his anonymity, the
absence of any perspective that might confirm or invalidate his erotic fable
about Yvonne, and above all the placing of the narrative within a region of
France whose past is present as a pervasive immanent violence—all this
encourages a view of fantasy as a subject’s desubjectifying insertion within a
particular region of being.
And, yet, contrary to Michon’s presentation of a world that corresponds to
but is independent of the protagonist’s fantasies of violence, the novel does
seem to cultivate a dream of the world’s disappearance. It is even as if we were
being given a key to La Grande Beune as a demonstration of fantasy’s power
to remake the world in its own image when the narrator says, just before the
end of his story, that the rain that never seems to stop allows us to substitute
our dreams for the world, to live “the satiety of our dreams behind this grey
curtain where everything is permitted” (OW, p. 81). Behind the curtain of
rain the founding desire of all particular desires might be realized: to make of
the entire world the mirror of our dreams, the place where nothing is differ-
ent, where nothing resists, where an omnipotent subject can write anything.
Michon often seems to be writing about writing, to be using his own text
in order to satisfy a dream of total reinscription by making of his novel an
emblematic deployment of that dream. (Even fishing is at one point called
writing on the water.) Thus the fantasized whip marks on Yvonne’s body can
be described as “an absolute writing”: “absolute” because the nonresistant
exceptional whiteness of her flesh is marked only by the material signs of an-
other subject’s power and desire. Indeed, receptive whiteness haunts the en-
tire text. There are the blind “albino fish” Yvonne’s lover has found floating
in an underground pool, killed by the electricity brought into the caves; the
white leathery skin of Jean-le-Pêcheur’s rare “mirror carp”; and perhaps most
notably the “inexhaustible whiteness” of the room to which Jeanjean brings
Mado and the narrator, a room with, as he says, in a strangely triumphant
manner, “absolutely nothing” on its walls (OW, p. 66). This, the narrator
conjectures, was Lascaux before the paintings, but with the hunter-painters
already there, preparing their materials, “conceiving” the scenes with which
they would cover the walls. The whiteness of the walls reminds us of a certain
precariousness in the transfer from the phenomenological to the ontologi-
cal. That which has taken place—settled being—may not recede into the
permanently potential. It may, as it were, stop at a “point” where potentiality
itself is merely potential. Jeanjean’s prized room puts Lascaux into question.
Its whiteness could be taken as an emblem of the susceptibility of all poten-

tial being to nothingness—as if potentiality could itself fail to “take place”
(in fantasy, and in art), could tilt the universe backward into the void, thus
failing to reinscribe the history of the universe in a vast present in which
nothing is lost, a present identical to the persistent intransitivity of being.
Whiteness—or an indefinitely prolonged possibility of possibility—is the
gravest threat to ontological intransitivity.
I n his seminar on identification, Lacan asks: What is the difference between

my dog and the human subject? He answers that his dog never mistakes
him for someone else, while misidentification of the other is constitutive of
the human. In a sense, then, Lacan’s dog is a better observer of the world
as world than his master. In the light of what I have been arguing here,
we might say that misidentification is inherent in our inability, or refusal,
to acknowledge the world’s independence. That refusal may itself be the
consequence of the human infant’s prolonged helplessness—unique among
animals—and dependence on others. If, as Freud says, “at the very beginning
. . . the external world, objects, and what is hated are identical,” and if, as he
also claims, “as an expression of the reaction of unpleasure evoked by ob-
jects, [hate] always remains in an intimate relation with the self-preservative
instincts,” this is because the external world is a potential threat, one against
which, for an exceptionally long period at the beginning of our lives, we
have neither the physical nor the psychic resources to defend ourselves. A
human subjectivity is thus developed on the ground of a profound insecurity,
one that might be lifted only if the world didn’t exist—or, put differently,
only if we could substitute ourselves for the world. Psychoanalysis has, on
the whole, been so committed to studying and “treating” the mechanisms
of this attempted substitution that it has failed to elaborate a concept of the
world as much more than a vaguely specified (or, at best, normative) reality
to which we must learn to “adapt.” To do so would mean recognizing that
the subject’s need to project himself on the world is not entirely necessary.
While a certain degree of anxiety about an unmastered world is inevitable,
it is also true, as I have been demonstrating through Michon’s novel, that we
correspond to the world in ways that don’t necessitate or imply the world’s
suppression. The world will always resist embodying our anxieties, or our
desires, but we are also in it independently of our need to master it. External
reality may at first present itself as an affective menace, but psychoanalysis—
like art, although in a more discursive mode—might train us to see our prior
presence in the world, to see, as bizarre as this may sound, that, ontologi-
cally, the world cares for us. Finally, however, as Michon’s exceptional novel
suggests, it is part of the complexity of a human destiny that we may fail to
find that care sufficiently satisfying, and so we will undoubtedly never stop
insisting—if only intermittently—that the jouissance of an illusion of sup-
pressing otherness can surpass the pleasure of finding ourselves harbored
within it.
11
The Will to Know
In the three published volumes of The History of Sexuality (which could

more accurately be called The History of Subjectivity), as well as in the
lectures at the Collège de France that were both the raw material and, for
Foucault’s readers, the indispensable amplification of that history, Foucault
studied the changing positions of knowledge of the self and what he called
“care of the self” in the history of the Western subject’s conceived relation to
truth. From the shifting emphases given in Greek and Roman antiquity to,
on the one hand, the philosophical theme of how to gain access to knowl-
edge and, on the other, the more specifically ethical souci de soi (how the
subject must be transformed, “cared for,” by a teacher and / or by the subject
himself ) in order to reach truth, to the relation in Christian thought between
self-renunciation and self-confession, and to the secularizing of the methods
and goals of self-confession in modern medicine, pedagogy, and psychiatry
and psychoanalysis, Foucault’s ambition was to trace, in the Western configu-
rations of subjectivity, the opposition as well as the interpenetrations between
philosophy of knowledge and the care of the self that he also called spiritu-
ality. While aware of the complexities, and perhaps above all of the non-,
even antilinear nature of this history, Foucault nonetheless identified the
beginning of the modern age in this history with what he called “the Carte-
sian moment,” the moment when knowledge and knowledge alone—to the
detriment of spirituality—became the subject’s path to truth. Even more:
the Cartesian type of knowledge, Foucault claims, substitutes a knowledge
of objects—and, ultimately, the acquisition, through science, of power over
the world—for the notion of an access to truth.
t h e w i l l t o k n ow | 155
We may of course, for all Foucault’s nuances and qualifications, be reluc-

tant to accept Foucault’s own grand oppositions as corresponding to “histori-
cal truth.” However, given both the slipperiness and the tendentious use of
that concept, Foucault’s fundamental distinction seems to me to have, at
the very least, a heuristic value. It lends itself to being reformulated as a dis-
tinction between two modes of positioning ourselves in the world: either as
subjects for whom knowledge is the principal aim in a struggle to appropriate
the irreducible and always potentially menacing otherness of the world, or as
subjects who connect, who correspond to, and with, the world’s essentially
hospitable being.
I say reformulated because in the Foucaldian scheme, the souci de soi
does not necessarily imply a shift in epistemological assumptions. Both
self-knowledge and care of the self are exercises of the self on the self; they
are not, inherently, different views of the relation between the self and the
world. The function of the Epicurean emphasis on the study of objects and
of other men, for example, is, as Foucault puts it, “to modify the subject’s be-
ing.” We might say that both self-knowledge and care of the self are different
techniques grounded in a shared assumption of the fundamental difference
between the subject and the world. Care of the self is another strategy within
that relational assumption rather than a modification of what is taken for
granted about relationality itself. Foucault was far from naively believing in
the possibility of adopting the ancient version of the souci de soi for ourselves.
Nonetheless, he insisted, in his 1981–82 course at the Collège de France on
“The Hermeneutics of the Subject,” on what he called the “urgent, funda-
mental, politically indispensable task” of constituting an “ethic of the self”
today since, as he believed, “there is no other point, first and last, of resistance
to political power than the relation of the self to the self.” I don’t, however,
see any possibility of this taking place without a concomitant change in the
modes we adopt of positioning ourselves in the world. To speak of the Carte-
sian absolutizing of knowledge as a liquidation of spirituality or a renuncia-
tion of the goal of accessing truth seems to me an inadequate specifying of
that presumed moment. The exclusiveness of knowledge is, after all, both
grounded in and authorized by a rigorous distinction between mind and non-
mind, between the cogito and the res extensa. Descartes’ occasional military
metaphors are justified by the ontological war inherent in that distinction:
knowledge, and especially scientific knowledge, is necessary in order to con-
quer alien territory. The political viability of the care of the self depends, if
it is to be more than a superficial self-aestheticizing, on the discovery, or the
rediscovery, of the continuity of being between the subject and the world,
a continuity that alone explains why the aim of knowledge of others and
objects for the sake of appropriation of others and objects is an ontological
illusion. From this perspective, a new “ethic of the self” could be conceived
of as a discipline of self-attunement, of the self attuning itself to something
like its own inexistent autonomy, or at the very least to the permeability of
the boundaries between itself and what Ulysse Dutoit and I have called its
innumerable inaccurate replications in the world.
I want to focus on what could be thought of as a radical, perhaps inher-
ently implosive stage of the historical episteme baptized by Foucault as the
Cartesian moment. I’m thinking of a field of knowability most fully, if ambig-
uously, exemplified by psychoanalysis and, in literature, by Proust. Psycho-
analysis has reformulated the epistemological imperative of self-knowledge
as a theory and practice of psychic truth. For classical psychoanalytic theory,
analysis is an investigation of a personal past. From this perspective, analysis
could be thought of—indeed has been thought of—as the epistemological
conquest inherent in a depth psychology: the unconscious would add to our
knowledge of the mind psychic contents never imagined by pre-Freudian
psychology. Viewed in Foucaldian terms, Freudian talk therapy is a massive
psychic confession on the part of the analysand. It reinstates the Cartesian
subject-object dualism in a relation between two human subjects. If the
analysand ultimately becomes “the one who knows” (about him or herself ),
and if analysts never entirely lose their ignorance of the psyche they help
to bring to self-knowledge, the analyst’s prestige as “the one who knows”
is nonetheless what initiates and sustains (and, by no means incidentally,
justifies the cost of ) what is perhaps not quite accurately referred to as the
psychoanalytic dialogue. An emphasis in post-Freudian therapy on the phe-
nomenon of countertransference has, it’s true, brought us a long way from
Freud’s dictum, in the 1912 essay “Advice to Doctors on Psychoanalytic Treat-
ment,” that “for the patient the doctor should remain opaque, and, like a
mirror surface, should show nothing but what is shown to him.” Yet even
this awareness of projective identifications from analyst to analysand (and
not merely in the opposite, strictly Freudian direction) has not, it could be
argued, changed the essential inequality of the analytic exchange. In the
analytic exchange, one interlocutor is vastly more voluble, exposed, and un-
informed (about both himself and his dialogic partner) than the other. Even
if we allow for what have become fashionable disclaimers of the analyst’s
position as “the one who knows,” the analytic contact is motivated, and in
effect determined, by the analysand’s ignorance and his reliance on a certain
type of knowledge presumed to be possessed by the analyst, a knowledge in-
tended to make the patient more knowledgeable (intellectually, affectively)

about himself.
Foucault saw the psychoanalytic version of the Western philosophy of self-
knowledge as a moment—an essentially sinister moment—in the exercise of
power in Western history, as having served a massive power strategy of norma-
tivizing subjectivity. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault
insists on the importance of desire as constitutive of a modern subjectivity,
but he finds the desire produced by specifically modern exercises of power
(psychoanalysis would be exemplary here) as the subject’s desire to know his
desire. The peculiarity of this extended moment in the history of power (our
moment) has, in Foucault’s argument, less to do with the particular contents
of the modern subject’s desires than with the subject’s acquiescing in the
view (promoted by power) that his desires (and especially his sexual desires)
are the key to his being. The defining desires themselves are secondary to this
epistemological hunger, almost irrelevant to the classifications and conse-
quent management made possible by our knowledge of them. Authoritarian
systems of government naturally profit from the confessional habits produced
by the diffuse exercises of power analyzed by Foucault. Confession makes
subjects visible, and their visibility (ideally, the visibility of desires which,
they have been made to believe, constitute their essence) is a precondition
of their political subjection.
I might, at several points of what I have been saying, been speaking not
only of psychoanalysis but also of Proust, who has given us the most incisive
and thorough representation of what we might call the psychoanalytic sub-
ject. For example, and most notably, the sequestering and relentless question-
ing of Albertine by Marcel in La Prisonnière is an attempt, on Marcel’s part,
to lead Albertine to a confession of her desires that will, he believes, make
her innermost being visible. The imprisoning of Albertine is a power strategy
designed to penetrate the secrets of her subjectivity. Proustian love exempli-
fies the Cartesian absolutizing of knowledge—with, however, an important
difference. Once intersubjectivity is conceived of not as an exchange of being
(more on this later) but in terms of a subject-object dualism, the object of
knowledge can will its own opacity, can hide behind its fundamentally differ-
ential otherness. Proustian love is the pursuit of that difference and the desire
to possess and annihilate it. First of all, we should note that the amorous pur-
suit in Proust is much more an epistemological than an erotic adventure. At
the very moment the narrator speaks of his intense suffering when he learns,
at the end of Sodome et Gomorrhe, that Albertine is a friend of Mlle. Vinteuil
(and therefore perhaps also a Gommorhean), he notes that the discovery of
“the most terrible reality” also brings with it “the joy of a beautiful discov-
ery,” one that leads, however, to another epistemological impasse: how to
penetrate the inconceivable “truth” of Albertine’s desires? Behind Albertine’s
physical presence, Marcel no longer sees “the blue mountains” of the sea at
Balbec, but rather the bedroom at Montjouvain where she has perhaps fallen
many times into Mlle. Vinteuil’s arms with a laugh containing her mysteri-
ous pleasure, “le son inconnu de sa jouissance.”
And yet, for all this emphasis on the mystery of Albertine’s desire, it’s not
at all clear that she is the object of Marcel’s need to know. The women he
has loved the most, the narrator confides, “have never coincided with my
love for them.” If they were able to awaken a very real love, indeed to bring
that love to its most extreme intensity, they were nonetheless not the “image”
contained within that love.
When I saw them [the mistresses whom I have loved most passionately], when I
heard their voices, I could find nothing in them which resembled my love and
could account for it. And yet my sole joy lay in seeing them, my sole anxiety
in waiting for them to come. It was as though a virtue that had no connexion
with them had been artificially attached to them by nature, and that this virtue,
this quasi-electric power, had the effect on me of exciting my love, that is to
say of controlling all my actions and causing all my sufferings. But from this,
the beauty, or the intelligence, or the kindness of these women was entirely
distinct. As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by
my loves, I have lived them, I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing
or thinking them.
In this extraordinary passage, we can see traces of a momentous redirection in

the trajectory of the Foucaldian history of self-knowledge, knowledge of the
object, and spirituality (or “care of the self”). It is as if, brought to its paroxysm,
knowledge of the object turns in on itself and becomes self-knowledge—not,
however, of a self identical to itself, but of a self alien to the subject in whom
it is hidden. The subject-object dualism remains; but now it is re-created
within the subject. This, I think, is the only way we can understand the nar-
rator’s strange and significant remark, in the passage I have been discussing,
that as Albertine moved away from him to get off the train at Parville, the
visible “spatial separation” between them was only an “appearance,” and
that, “for someone who might have tried, according to what was truly real, to
re-design things, it would have been necessary to place Albertine now, not at
some distance from me, but within me.” Marcel’s anguished determination
not to let Albertine leave him, even for the briefest time, is exactly identical
to her irrelevance to that determination. The uncrossable distance separat-
ing them is now an internal distance. Since Marcel seems to understand this
clearly enough, why, we might ask, is he so insistent on keeping her close to
him—even more strangely, on relentlessly quizzing her about her desires? It
is as if the other could become, or could embody, an alien self, a self that at
once “belongs” to the subject and is perhaps inconceivably external to him.
We might apply to this relation Jacques-Alain Miller’s term “extimacy”: the
subject’s most intimate “I” is also outside the subject. The human subject is
divided: the unconscious, and its “distance” from a knowing consciousness,
makes obsolete any notion of a unified self. The “inconceivable truth” of Al-
bertine’s desire is a projection of the inconceivability of Marcel’s desire. “All
jealousy,” the narrator profoundly notes elsewhere, “is self-jealousy,” which
we might take to be the Proustian formulation of Freud’s argument in his
1914 essay on narcissism that the loving subject projects onto the loved one
his own idealized and now lost infantile ego.
Proustian love anticipates a well-known Lacanian dictum: the object of
my desire is not the cause of my desire. This could in turn be thought of as an
extrapolation of Freud’s argument in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
concerning the relation between sexual desire and its objects. Unlike others
before him who had merely noted that desire can swerve from the object to
which, presumably, it is “naturally” attached, Freud insisted on the intrinsi-
cally free-floating nature of desire: it is available to any object and must be
trained to focus on the “proper” object. The sexual is defined not in terms
of predetermined object relations, but rather as the effect nearly any object
can have on the structure of the ego. Sexuality, according to passages in the
Three Essays which, following Jean Laplanche’s analysis in Life and Death in
Psychoanalysis, I have commented on in The Freudian Body, would consist
in a shattering of ego boundaries produced by any number of unaccountable,
unclassifiable objects. There are degrees of self-shattering, ranging from such
examples of sexual stimulation (given by Freud in the Three Essays) as intel-
lectual strain, verbal disputes, and railway travel, to the ultimate devastation
of the ego and of the subject in death. Thus Laplanche, reversing Freud’s
domestication of his own early definition of the sexual by opposing it to the
death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, identifies the death drive with
sexuality. What all the different stimuli mentioned by Freud have in com-
mon is their ability to set affect free from psychic organization; unbound
affect produces the excitement of jouissance. Jouissance has little to do with
what we ordinarily think of as sexual pleasure. Indeed, it may more properly
be thought of, as Lacan suggests, as the enemy of pleasure. Following this

line of thought, we can say that, far from promoting the pansexualism it was
for a long time accused of, psychoanalysis proposes a definition of sexuality
that has very little to do with what we think of as sex (which may be little
more than a contingent manifestation of it). Interestingly, this radical cur-
rent in psychoanalytic thought (which seems to me central to the originality
of psychoanalysis) is echoed by Proust. Proustian passion is curiously—and,
from a psychoanalytic perspective, appropriately—detached from sexual de-
sire. Remember that Odette is not Swann’s sexual type; what changes his
mildly sensual interest in her into a frenzy of jealous passion is simply his
not being able to find her one evening. Her unlocatability (which, as I have
been suggesting, may be Swann’s own unlocatability) shatters him into love
for an object whose inaccessibility will be her principal seductiveness. Simi-
larly, immediately after the passage from Sodome et Gommorhe I quoted a
few moments ago, the role of sex in love is literally reduced to a parenthetical
remark. Physical pleasure, the narrator notes, accompanies love but is insuf-
ficient to create it, and this is because our desire is in reality directed toward
those “invisible forces” by which it is accompanied, forces that don’t belong
to the loved one but which, as it were, have momentarily lodged themselves
within her.
Within the Western literary tradition, Proust is perhaps the principal
avatar of—to return to Foucault’s historical scheme—a reappearance of a
project of self-knowledge within the subject-object dualism of the Cartesian
opposition between mind and non-mind. But now the dualism is between
subject-mind and object-mind. The psychoanalytic turn given to this impos-
sible project of appropriating another consciousness is to make of the other’s
consciousness a screen for the otherness hidden within the subject’s own
consciousness. Love for the other is from this perspective a displaced self-
love, or a blind narcissism.
I want, however, to suggest that at this extreme point in its history, the pur-
suit of self-knowledge gives rise to what may be a new episteme and, cor-
relatively, to the discovery of a new relation to the world. The object returns,
so to speak, to the world, but not as an unknowable object. Rather, the world
is seen as a field of extensibility for the self, the site of innumerable corre-
spondences of being. In Proust, this radical shift takes place in his reflections
on art, more specifically on the type of individuality expressed in art. Art
elaborates an individuality more general than individuals: in French, the in-
dividuel (a type of individuated being more general than a personal psychol-
ogy or individuality) rather than the individu (a particular person). The world
expressed in art, as Deleuze has put it in his book on Proust, “does not exist
outside of the subject which expresses it, but is expressed as the essence, not
of the subject itself, but of Being, or of the region of Being which is revealed
to the subject.”
The Proustian notion of art is perhaps, most profoundly, a prioritizing
of shared being over appropriated knowledge. Art would be a model for the
relation of the self to the self and to the world that would be neither one of
self-knowledge nor one of an attempted knowledge of the world. It would
thus return us to something like the “spirituality” that Foucault opposes to
knowledge in his history of Western subjectivity. What I have in mind is
not, however, identical to what Foucault calls care of the self, which, as he
emphasizes, was a discipline of the self exercised on the self rather than a
transformation of the subject’s fundamental relation to the world. And it
seems to me that it is a transformation of this sort—of our relation to the
world—that Foucault had in mind when he summoned us to invent “new
relational modes.” If there is no solution easily recognizable as “political”
to the violence in which, directly or indirectly, we are all implicated, it is,
Foucault believed, because no recognizably political solution can be durable
without something approaching a mutation in our most intimate relational
system, a mutation involving a shift in the conditions and the very field of
knowability. Foucault’s call for “new relational modes” struck some of his
readers as politically evasive; it seems to me, on the contrary, that his sum-
moning us to rethink relationality is at once an instance of political realism
and a moral imperative.
It is likely that Foucault would have been astonished, and perhaps even
displeased, to learn that in our recent book, Intimacies, Adam Phillips and
I enlist psychoanalysis in our attempt to trace the contours of an as yet un-
familiar antiepistemological episteme. Ideally conducted, analysis can lead
to the dissolution of the self—that is, to the loss of the very grounds of self-
knowledge. Psychoanalysis could undo the subjectivity necessary to a psycho-
logical philosophy of knowledge. Seen in this way, psychoanalytic treatment
would not be primarily a subject-object relation in which the analyst helps
the analysand to excavate and to know the secrets or drives that have brought
him or her to treatment. Rather, it would be an exercise in the depersonaliz-
ing of both analyst and analysand, in the creation of a new, third subjectivity
to which no individual name can be attached, a subjectivity in which the
two find themselves corresponding—co-responding—in the transindividual
being which, they have discovered, “belongs” to neither of them, but which
they share. Our claim, then, is that even the analytic dialogue can be con-
ducted as an “experience of exchange . . . , of desire indifferent to personal
identity,” no longer ruled by “a collusion of ego-identities.” We call such an
exchange an experience of impersonal intimacy. If, however, such intimacies
are focused on the future since they are not dependent on personal pasts, our
emphasis on the future would be glibly utopic if it were not grounded in a
reimagining of the analytic past. If, as Phillips writes, “impersonal intimacy
asks of us what is literally the most inconceivable thing: to believe in the
future without needing to personalize it,” that belief becomes at least some-
what conceivable if we can believe, to begin with, in an impersonal past.
Christopher Bollas’s fascinating discussion of “the transformational object”
helps us to spell out developmental alternatives, within a person’s past, to the
personal. A psychoanalyst’s interest in the past can, it turns out, be entirely
compatible with an impersonal relationality. The mother of early infancy
may be one, to quote from Phillips’s reading of Bollas, “whose selfhood we
need not recognize. Indeed, it is our very powerlessness to do so at that stage
that makes [the] cumulative transformations [evoked by Bollas] possible.”
In The Shadow of the Object, Bollas describes a “being-with, as a form of
dialogue,” that enables “the baby’s adequate processing of his existence prior
to his ability to process it through thought.” Phillips, elaborating on this
wordless “dialogue,” speaks of mother and infant being “attuned . . . to what
each is becoming in the presence of the other.” (Bollas speaks of the baby
being transformed by the mother’s “aesthetic of handling.”) Love is perhaps
always—as both Plato and Freud suggest—a phenomenon of memory, but
what is remembered in the expansive narcissism of an impersonal intimacy
is not some truth we know about the self, but rather, as Phillips says in In-
timacies, “a process of becoming,” or, in other terms, evolving affinities of
being. The subject’s need to know the other, rather than being valued as our
highest relational aspiration, should be seen, as Phillips writes of the rela-
tion between mother and child, as “a defence against what is unknowingly
evolving, as potential, between them.” This potentiality is originally initiated
by the mother’s “aesthetic of handling” and repeated but also modified and
recategorized in the splintered, nonassignable subjectivity between analyst
and analysand.
T he key words for the new relational field toward which I have been mov-
ing in the second half of this discussion (a field no longer dominated by
a Cartesian dualism between a knowing subject and a vast domain of objects
principally conceived of in terms of their knowability or nonknowability) are:
potentiality, the transindividual, impersonal correspondences, and a general

typology of being beyond, or perhaps before, psychological individuality. I
will conclude with a brief discussion of a major figure in this reimagining of
the relational. Jean-Luc Godard’s 1982 masterpiece, Passion, is a finished film
about, apparently, an unfinished film. I say “apparently” because the word
“about” immediately commits us to the kind of narrative statement that Go-
dard’s film (principally through Jerzy, the director of the internal film) relent-
lessly mocks. As far as we can tell, Jerzy’s film (also called Passion) is “about”
nothing but a series of at times mobile, at times immobile tableaux vivants
of famous paintings by Rembrandt, Goya, Ingres, Delacroix, and El Greco;
the reconstruction of these paintings is accompanied, as are many other
scenes in Godard’s film, by excerpts from music by Ravel, Mozart, Fauré,
Beethoven, and Dvořák. The film that contains this enigmatic, fragmented
visual and aural feast has, it’s true, considerably more narrative substance.
Jerzy is torn between Hana (the owner of the hotel where the crew is staying)
and Isabelle (who is trying to organize a protest with her co-workers against
the working conditions at the factory owned by Hana’s husband, Michel).
Godard has spoken in an interview of an analogy between these workers’
discontent and what seems to be a fitful rebellion on the part of the extras in
Jerzy’s film. Within the film, the connection between work and love is made
by several characters. “Work has the same gestures as love,” Isabelle says, a
likeness affirmed by Godard himself in his short film Scenario for Passion,
where he speaks of having noticed that resemblance in a Tintoretto painting
(one not, I should add, present in the film Passion).
There is, then, some potentially heavy thematic and narrative material in
Passion. What I find most striking about the film is, however, the multiple
ways in which it seems to be pulling away, or withdrawing from, not only a
development of such material, but also from any sort of finished statement
whatsoever. It is as if Godard were trying to decompose his film, to withdraw
it into the not-yet-having-taken-place condition of Jerzy’s film. Much of Pas-
sion consists of the filming of scenes from Jerzy’s Passion, not, however, in
the form of fully reconstituted paintings, but rather in the partially realized
form of paintings that appear to have been unmade in order to be cinemati-
cally put together again tentatively, and at times somewhat differently, from
the originals. Jerzy even seems peculiarly detached from his film: he never
discusses it except to complain about the lighting which, to judge from a talk
he has with his friend and assistant Laszlo, he conceives of mainly as between
rather than directly on parts of the paintings, much as Jerzy himself, as he
says, is affectively suspended between Hana and Isabelle. Furthermore—and
this is a Godardian trademark—the sense of statements is undercut by the

frequent desynchronizing of the aural and the visual (we see characters mov-
ing their lips as we hear other characters’ voices), as well as by the many, at
times unattributable, voice-off remarks and by the superimposing of differ-
ent, unconnected sounds and voices (Léo Ferré reciting Villon’s “Ballade des
pendus” as Jerzy, Patrick and Sophie talk about paying the actors and what
scenes they are now going to film, or the sound of a car horn blaring into a
passage of music).
Godard has other tricks for impeding, or blocking, the sense of otherwise
conventionally synchronized voices and presences. Isabelle stutters, Michel’s
sentences are cut up by his persistent cough, the producer speaks only Ital-
ian, Jerzy and Hana have foreign accents and at times slip into their native
Polish and German. The characters have been given the first names of the
actors who play them; for the most part, the actors’ last names have disap-
peared or, in the case of Michel Piccoli, been changed. Isabelle’s grandfather
stubbornly refuses to “say his sentence,” apparently a pre-bedtime ritual: “Dis
ta phrase,” she implores, a sentence repeated several times a few minutes
later by François as he appears to be sexually penetrating Magali from behind
in a doorway. Toward the end of the film we hear Michel’s voice plaintively
complaining: “I’m looking for a definitive sentence, but I can’t find one,” a
failure Jerzy’s film seems complacently to prolong and toward which Go-
dard’s film perversely, and more or less successfully, strives. At the end, Lazlo
goes to Hollywood to work on the film for Metro, where it has been accepted,
but Jerzy drops the whole project and starts driving home, to Poland. In an-
other car, Hana and Isabelle, whom Hana picks up walking on the road, also
set out for Poland, which, however, can hardly be said to be a place any of
them realistically set out for. If it has somehow become “home” for several
of the characters (Polish or not), and while we should of course remember
that the film takes place during the struggle between Solidarity and the Pol-
ish Communist government (an event the film refers to), Godard doesn’t
bother to give any psychological or political plausibility to this sudden exodus
to Poland. Poland is perhaps nothing more than the arbitrary metaphor for
the whiteness into which we see the cars disappear, the misty whiteness of a
snow-covered landscape. That whiteness recalls or, more exactly, anticipates
the blank page Godard refers to in the Scenario as the Mallarmean page
blanche that precedes and, more profoundly, defies all realized art. Passion is
an aesthetic adventure in moving backward: from the film Godard actually
made, to the other cinematic Passion Jerzy is always stopping work on, to the
renunciation of that film and the dispersal of its players (as well as of Godard’s
other characters), and, finally to the Scenario that came out after Passion, as if
Godard’s time had become a reel he could rewind—that is, not a time from
a scenario to a finished film, but rather from the film that has been made to
its tentative form that must have preceded but now follows it, and, finally,
to that blankness pre- and postfigured in the film’s final shot, the strangely
displaced point of arrival of the film’s actual point of departure, which was its
pure virtuality in Godard’s mind.
The Godardian movement backwards, far from negativizing or simply
erasing the finished being it leaves, actually expands it by potentializing it.
Partially derealized being is virtual being. A difficult but fundamental ques-
tion remains: What is the activity of virtuality? Or, put in other terms, Godard
must discover, or invent, a type of relationality that is at once the phenome-
nological operator and the sign of the real becoming the potential. Or, in still
another formulation, what is potentiality’s syntax? For Jerzy and for Godard,
the syntax of stories is a form of accounting. The story-hungry Italian pro-
ducer is also obsessed with the cost of things; Laszlo takes him through the
studio (“the most modern in Europe,” Sophie says), mentioning the prices
of the equipment and the costumes. In story telling, elements are added to
one another in order to make a sum of completed meaning; the sense we get
from narratively coherent stories is, Godard suggests, determined by their
epistemologically additive bias. This does not mean, however, that Godard’s
film—perhaps unlike Jerzy’s film—is structurally incoherent. There are,
most notably, couplings that give to Godard’s work a certain structural con-
nectedness: the relation of Godard’s Passion to Jerzy’s Passion; the aesthetic
couples of film and painting, as well as of music and the visual arts; the two
types of love—open and closed, Jerzy says—embodied in Isabelle and Hana;
the mingling as well as the opposition of home and foreignness (and of the
irreconcilable destinations of Hollywood and Poland); and of course the the-
matic coupling of work and love.
Instead of being encouraged to answer the question of how, most notably,
love and work are alike, we are compelled to ask the more fundamental ques-
tion of what “alikeness” means for Godard. Take, for example, the incongru-
ous symmetry of the “traces” that are at the beginning and near the end of
Passion. The film opens with shots of the long white trace left by a plane in
the sky; much later, when Jerzy and Isabelle are making love and he says that
now he will take her from behind, she assents, saying, “Yes, there mustn’t be
any traces.” This last scene is immediately followed by a shot of El Greco’s
Assumption of the Virgin, a tribute to the human vessel of the momentously
untraceable event of Christ’s conception. So one kind of trace starts the film,
while negations of a very different sort of trace conclude it, negations that
are also incongruously “like” Godard’s derealizing movements I discussed a
moment ago. In what way is Isabelle at once losing and keeping her possible
virginity (she answers “perhaps” when Jerzy asks her if she is a virgin) “like”
Mary’s at once conceiving Jesus and negating the conception presupposed
by a human birth? One of the first things we hear (barely hear) Isabelle say
as she works is “Why have you abandoned me?”—a question she repeats to
Jerzy a few minutes later as she runs alongside his slowly moving car, but
which also recalls the vastly more momentous question, at least as reported
by Mark, of Christ on the cross.
Godard’s similitudes are radically different from Proustian metaphors.
For Proust—at least ideally, or theoretically—to juxtapose the two terms
of a metaphor would disengage the essence they have in common. Diffrer-
ences would be subordinated (if not erased) to a shared identity; phenom-
enological diversity would be superseded by ontological oneness. Godard’s
similitudes make no such claim. Isabelle and the Virgin, Jerzy abandoning
Isabelle and God the Father abandoning His Son, the gestures of work and
the gestures of love: alikeness here has none of the substantive identity of
Proustian metaphor, but seems more like a possibility that might reduce the
incongruity of the comparison. It’s as if Isabelle’s sense of being abandoned,
and the gestures of her work, were reaching toward the terms to which they
are compared, were not the discovery but rather the experimental initiation
of a connection, or a correspondence. The alikeness of the terms is an es-
sentially unrepresentable virtuality, the beginning of a rearrangement of the
field of knowability. The unfinished and the incongruous are the principal
features of Godard’s extraordinary proposal about how we might both see and
think the universe. Desynchronization accounts for much of what is hectic
and ungraspable in a Godard film; more profoundly, it is the condition of
possibility (if not, to use a distinction emphasized by Jerzy, probability) of
recomposed relationality.
A certain gravity, even melancholy, in the episode that alternates the film-
ing of the El Greco painting with the scene of Jerzy and Isabelle in Isabelle’s
bedroom (an episode accompanied by Fauré’s Requiem) is perhaps the affec-
tive sign of Godard’s consciousness of the “expense” of desynchronization,
the provisional lessness consequent upon a loss of coherent being. The pas-
sion of unfinishing, even crucifying, his own work and the identity that might
be traced by that work (“I began to mourn myself at an early age,” Godard
says in JLG by JLG) is at once exhilarating and tragic. Tragic in that possibil-
ity itself might disappear into the undifferentiated whiteness of the road to
Poland; exhilarating in that a floating, tentative, improbable relational field

multiplies connections, creates a space for new, unpredictable, unclassifiable
relations. The unfinished and the incongruous have what we might call a flo-
tational effect on the real, an effect figured by the curiously unsettled figures
in the El Greco painting, figures suspended between two subjects (certain
critics have spoken of the painting as an Immaculate Conception) and who
are filmed in a way that makes them appear to be floating, even mutating, in
space. Godard has been a major agent in a contemporary reformulation of
the aesthetic, the aesthetic as no longer confined to objects culturally tagged
as art (a tagging accompanied by a reactive, reactionary anxiety about what
art “is”), but as carrying the privilege and the responsibility of an otherwise
inconceivable concretizing of the metaphysical. In Godard’s film, the aes-
thetic passion of desynchronizing the elements of an artwork is doubled by
the ontological passion of derealized being. What “knowledge” might mean
or be under these conditions remains to be defined—if, that is, the question
itself is not dismissed. Perhaps we should simply try to engage in other exer-
cises in incongruity, as I have tried to do by juxtaposing Foucault, Proust, the
psychoanalytic dialogue, and a film by Godard as remotely similar demon-
strations of the proliferative nature of unripe, virtual being.
The discussion of Godard beginning on p. 163 was written in collaboration with Ulysse Dutoit.
PART
3
Two Interviews
12
A Conversation with Leo Bersani

with Tim Dean, Hal Foster, and Kaja Silverman
Hal Foster: I thought we could begin with the topos of failure. It is a primary
subject of your recent work: a critique of redemptive practices in The
Culture of Redemption [1990]; an argument for impotent aesthetics in
the recent book coauthored with Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment
[1993]; an analysis of failed subjectivity in Homos [1995]. But it is a prin-
cipal method as well: for example, in The Freudian Body [1986] you focus
on the points in Freud where his thought breaks down, and these you
regard as the most provocative, even the most productive (if that is not
too un-Bersanian a value). In what ways is failure a method for you, and
how does it differ, say, from a dialectical concern with contradiction or a
deconstructive concern with aporia?
Leo Bersani: That’s an interesting way to begin, even though it sounds inaus-
picious. My interest in failure has, I guess, been fairly constant. It’s there
in the early books, too, when I talked (optimistically) about mobility and
immobility of desire in Baudelaire [Baudelaire and Freud (1977)], as well
as in several French novelists in Balzac to Beckett / Center and Circumfer-
ence in French Fiction [1970]. The latter explored the notion of a circum-
ferential expansiveness of the self against a fixed anchoring of the self. A
Future for Astyanax [1976] strikes me as the most coherent statement of
this early position, of this version of the argument against the immobile,
centered, self-contained subject.
Failure first played an explicit role in The Freudian Body, where it
Originally appeared in October 82 (Fall 1997): 3–16.

a c o n v e r s a t i o n w i t h l e o b e r s a n i | 172
really concerns a collapse of the text. This was not like deconstructive
readings that tend to reconstruct texts according to rhetorically determined
thematics that run counter to what authors seem to think they’re writing
about. (This led, incidentally, to a generation of graduate students who
relentlessly “proved” that they were smarter than Rousseau, Wordsworth,
James, Melville, etc.) In The Freudian Body, I was interested in the text
simply going to pieces, and also in the way collapse itself is thematized
in the idea of self-shattering (which I drew from Jean Laplanche). My
interest in failure then continued in various ways—a culture without re-
demptive power, certain failures in art and writing, homosexuality as a
beneficent crisis of selfhood, and now what Ulysse Dutoit and I call, in
our work on Caravaggio, a betrayal of the historical subject.
Important questions for me right now are: What is the relation between
my interest in failure and my writing about homosexuality? And what is the
psychic and / or political value of this insistence? Is it merely a recuperative
move that ends up denying failure, or is it consistent with maintaining
it? And in what way might these questions serve what I think is our most
urgent project now: redefining modes of relationality and community, the
very notion of sociality? All this also concerns the role of psychoanalysis
in my work, first in revealing that failure, and then in revealing, after a
certain point, a kind of failure within psychoanalysis itself—or its limited
usefulness—for this sort of study.
Tim Dean: If your focus in The Freudian Body is on the points where the
text collapses, fragmenting into a lack of coherence, what comes after this
failure? Does it lead to a new place that is not simply a reconstitution of
the previous one?
Kaja Silverman: That leads me to ask a question as well. Leo, you and I
are people who write constantly against the self—against mastery and
power. Both of us privilege the moment of undoing, and see it as some-
thing which must either be endlessly repeated, or prolonged to infinity.
It seems to me that your emphasis on failure needs to be thought about
in this context. You valorize the moment of dissolution or “shattering”
because you cannot imagine anything on the other side of that shattering
except a reversion to the same. And it is that reversion—that unavoidable
recuperation—which you seek to inhibit.
Bersani: I agree. I don’t think of it as a going beyond, or that one can finally
get rid of the self. That seemed to be the goal of the “schizophrenic” cul-
tural politics of about twenty years ago, and now that strikes me as naïve
and politically irresponsible.
Foster: But these terms, mastery and containment, seem too total. Often in
your work you privilege failed subjectivity—just as Kaja has privileged
masochistic masculinity—as a critical position. But that seems to project
a subject that is successful, a social that is solid, against which these figures
then appear as critical. Might your very insistence on shattered and / or
supine figures make the symbolic order appear more intact than it is?
Bersani: It doesn’t presuppose an intact order but rather one constantly
straining toward mastery and containment—straining toward it in a sui-
cidal way. It’s very important to analyze that striving for containment in
ethical and epistemological positions that presuppose a mastery over the
object—to analyze them in terms of a movement toward mastery over the
other that in fact masks and secretly promotes a suicidal self-dissolution.
The crucial text here is Civilization and Its Discontents, which dissects the
morality of civilization, its attempt to assert a self-contained mastery over
disharmony, conflict, violence. That text suggests that there’s no confident
self-containment either on the subjective or the social level. The renun-
ciation of aggressiveness multiplies the force of aggression; the socialized
superego of civilization is itself constitutively self-destructive. So the ques-
tion to ask is not whether such self-containment exists but what strategic
purpose the insistence upon it serves. I think that purpose is to obscure or
to repress the suicidal urge that underlies it.
For me, the culture of redemption is historically the obverse side of
this suicidal movement. It is a shadow culture that does what the society
has failed to do; it helps to repress the destructive impulses for which it is
also meant to compensate. To what extent would the suicidal movement
be exposed if there were no culture of redemption? It would be much
more visible.
Foster: Hence your formula “the culture of redemption is the culture of
death.”
Bersani: Yes, because the culture denies the historical reality that it attempts
to redeem, represses the suicidal impulse that is its very motivation. The
culture of redemption is thus not mimetic, except in a very twisted way:
it denies that to which it is related. Officially, it always presents itself as
making the civilization intelligible—as a philosophically and aestheti-
cally superior version of the reality that society lives historically. Of course,
it reveals certain truths about this society, but not the truth of its suicidal
movement or even the truth of its own obscuring function.
Dean: Leo, your distinction between a suicidal dissolution and a nonsui-
cidal self-dissolution is a very difficult one. It seems that it involves the
effects of the superego not only on the ego but on social relations. In The
Freudian Body, in your reading of Civilization and Its Discontents, you
argue that the superego isn’t simply an internalizing of paternal aggres-
sion so much as a folding back on oneself of one’s own outwardly directed
aggression—and that folding back is about a suicidal self-dissolution.
What, then, is this other benign, nonsuicidal self-dissolution?
Bersani: To try and answer that I should refer to the part of The Freudian Body
that interests me most—the discussion of masochism in relation to Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. And here I differ from Kaja because I
still am interested in masochism—but in a masochism connected to, as
you say, a nonsuicidal dissolution of the subject. Here we have to go back
to the notion in Laplanche that sexuality is originally constituted as mas-
ochism. For me, Laplanche was suggesting, without saying this, that what
is inherently destructive is also originally a mode of survival. This led to
the speculation in the second chapter of The Freudian Body concerning
the evolutionary purpose served by sexuality as ébranlement, as shatter-
ing. Perhaps the only way for the infant to survive the imbalance between
external stimuli and the ego structures prepared to receive them is to find
the pain of this imbalance pleasurable. This does not mean, incidentally,
that ébranlement is an empirical characteristic of our sexual lives; it means
that a masochistic self-shattering was constitutive of our identity as sexual
beings, that it is present, always, not primarily in our orgasms but rather in
the terrifying but also exhilarating instability of human subjectivity.
Two questions here: In what forms does this early threat to the consti-
tution of our sexual selves persist in adult consciousness? And how does
the originary experience of masochism enter into constructing intersub-
jectivity and sociality? These are crucial questions my subsequent work
begins to address. That originary experience cannot be forgotten or done
away with; we always revert to it in some way; there is always a memory
of self-constitution that includes this masochistic coming-into-being of
the sexual.
What interests me now is a productive masochism, which, thanks
largely to the work on the visual arts that I have done with Ulysse Dutoit,
I have begun to think in a nonbiological, perhaps even nonpsychologi-
cal, way. It is a more spatial conception that brings masochism together
with narcissism. In other words, I am now interested in masochism not
as pleasure in pain so much as the pleasure of at once losing the self and
discovering it elsewhere, inaccurately replicated.
Silverman: Why is it still masochistic?
Bersani: Because it still means a certain pleasurable renunciation of one’s

own ego boundaries, the pleasure of a kind of self-obliteration.
Silverman: But is that masochism or self-divestiture? Your new argument,
in the Caravaggio work, about the extensibility of the subject and the
communication of forms seems related to the old argument about self-
shattering, but it’s qualitatively different.
Bersani: It’s important to me to talk about it precisely as masochism and
narcissism and not as self-divestiture because self-divestiture approaches
what I have tried to avoid, and that is any connection of these ideas to
castration. This is a major point of difference between us: I am interested
in a pleasure in losing or dissolving the self that is in no way equated with
loss, but comes rather through rediscovering the self outside the self. It is
a kind of spatial, anonymous narcissism.
Silverman: Your idea of a communication of forms seems to be really new
and original. I think it’s a mistake to fold it back into your earlier argument
about self-shattering and masochism. That seems a reactive gesture, which
prevents the communication of forms from achieving its own conceptual
space. It suggests that you’re still talking about body or psyche—about
pleasure “trenching” on pain, or about what you thematize as psychic
“detumescence” in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” [1987]. In fact, you’re talk-
ing about form.
Bersani: What for you is a reactive gesture is for me a point of departure. Our
move toward a correspondence of forms, in Arts of Impoverishment and
now in the Caravaggio work, depends on a certain notion of masochism.
If there weren’t pleasure in giving up what our civilization insists that we
retain—our ego boundaries—the communication of forms would never
occur. So masochism is the precondition of this passage. However, when
we talk about the correspondence of forms, it is true we are no longer
talking about masochism per se, and in the Caravaggio work there is little
use of the term.
Dean: Part of this debate is terminological: What are the intellectual and
political implications of terms like masochism? But there is another term
significant in your work by its absence. As you said a moment ago, you
are keen to get outside a model based on castration. You are prepared to
talk about loss but not with castration as its master term. Some might see
your discussion of loss, then, as an idealization—even as a defense against
castration. Can you elaborate on the role or nonrole of castration in your
work?
Bersani: Okay, but to do so I need to retrace my itinerary—and Laplanche’s.
Obviously they are different, but two notions in Laplanche are crucial for
me: first, self-shattering (which is connected to the primacy of masochism
in sexuality), and now the enigmatic signifier. But I want to take them in
the direction of a productive masochism, and Laplanche does not. He
talks about sexuality and the death drive, but never about how masochism
might be exploited for a move into the correspondence of forms.
The notion of self-shattering is a somewhat solipsistic view of the sex-
ual: the infant is born into sexuality by being overwhelmed by external
stimuli, but it is a solitary situation. The notion of the enigmatic signifier
places the birth of the sexual in a specific intersubjective context. And this
has led me to a question that interests me very much: How do we rethink
the constitution of the couple? And in what ways is this reconstitution the
absolute precondition of any rethinking of sociality? That is the center of
my work right now, not masochism.
So the notion of the enigmatic signifier places self-shattering in a new
context—in the calling of the subject into a human community (as we
termed it in Arts of Impoverishment). The question then becomes: What
version of this calling do we have now, and what other versions can be
produced? If we want to change the nature of our community, we have
to rethink our originary call into it—how human organisms are made
into human subjects. Beckett plays with this question in Company when
he imagines somebody standing above a crib and calling. Where is the
sound? the helpless infant asks. What is its nature? Is it attacking me?
soliciting me? nurturing me? Of course, these questions are not linguisti-
cally formulated, and the disorientation is spatial, but it still involves a
pleasure in the very pain of being disoriented.
The enigmatic signifier is a call like this: an adult addresses the infant
with some message. For Laplanche the infant experiences this message as
threatening; the adult is carrying so many sexual significations that he or
she cannot help but overwhelm the infant. So how does the infant respond
to these enigmatic signifiers? Laplanche says that it responds by taking the
mass of what it can’t understand and making it unconscious—that’s his
new version of primal repression. The repression puts the nonmetaboliz-
able parts of the enigmatic message into the unconscious.
Dean: Are these things made into the unconscious, or do they already count
as unconscious by virtue of their being enigmatic?
Bersani: What exactly is involved in primal repression is impossible to de-
scribe empirically. But Laplanche does talk about it as crucial to the very
constitution of the unconscious.
The extraordinary thing, I think, is that this idea traces the end of psy-
choanalysis as a useful way of describing relationality. The Laplanchean
unconscious, unlike the Lacanian one, is a mass of nonmetabolizable
refuse, the waste of the enigmatic signifier; as such it is useless in describ-
ing relationality. For me the theory of the enigmatic signifier is one of the
most moving events in the history of thought because it shows psychoana-
lytic thought refining itself out of existence. Laplanche would never admit
this; he sees it as another step within psychoanalytic speculation. . . .
Dean: And I see it as another step in Laplanche’s thought—toward Lacan!
Bersani: With the enigmatic signifier, the adult withholds what might com-
plete the infant by giving it knowledge. The infant may then experience
this unmasterable event as a kind of castration. More importantly, it seems
to me, it begins the whole problematic of knowledge: What does the enig-
matic signifier mean? This sets up the couple in a relation of paranoid
fascination (and here there is a connection to Lacan): I need to know the
message, but I am cut off from its sense.
There is no way to escape this confrontation, but there might be a way
to rethink it—to rethink the constitution of the couple in order to move
to a different relation to otherness, not one based in paranoid fascina-
tion but one that might use the masochistic element in the confrontation
productively. As it is, the ego, in order to protect itself from the attack
of the enigmatic signifier, becomes hyperbolically defended or armored.
But might this very threat to the self open the subject, leading to a self-
extensibility rather than a paranoid defensiveness? This is the move Ulysse
and I trace in Caravaggio’s painting: from the teasingly enigmatic eroti-
cism of the portraits of boys to the nonsexual sensuality of physical con-
tacts, extensions, and correspondences, from a problematic of knowledge
(and interiority) to a kind of cartography of the subject, a tracing of spatial
connectedness.
Silverman: As I indicated earlier, what interests me is the move you make
beyond the categories we conventionally use to think the relational—
categories like bodies and psyches. So I’m still very fascinated with that
period of your and Ulysse Dutoit’s writing that extends from The Culture
of Redemption, through Arts of Impoverishment, to Homos. Think, for in-
stance, of the following formulation in Homos: “His sexual preference,”
you write of a protagonist in Gide, “is without psychic content; there are
no complexes, no repressed conflicts, no developmental explanations;
only the chaste promiscuity of form repeatedly reaching out to find itself
beyond itself.” With a sentence like this, you help us rethink the relational
in terms of design. You remind us that the ego is in fact a form, although
we don’t usually think about it that way. It is constituted through the
imaginary incorporation of a series of external Gestalten, which Freud
conceptualizes as abandoned love-objects, and Lacan as imagoes. There
is a lot to be gained through thinking about the ego in formal terms. First,
it’s de-anthropomorphizing. It permits us to begin conceptualizing rela-
tionality outside the usual human categories, which have become very
reduced in recent years through the insistence upon race, class, gender,
etc. It helps us to understand that what we are at the level of the ego may
be a much more complex issue than we are accustomed to imagining,
having to do not only with mothers, fathers, lovers, etc., but also with line,
shape, composition, color . . .
Bersani: That’s exactly what we’re interested in emphasizing. Furthermore,
the very fact that the ego is a “form” in the sense you’ve just described
should also have an effect on the way we think of our relations with “moth-
ers, fathers, lovers.” As I’ve suggested, the couple constituted by the enig-
matic signifier raises the question of how the social is constituted—and
other ways it might be imagined. It’s very important to work on this imag-
ining collaboratively, perhaps even to have workshops on ways to address
the human that do not only repeat the originary situation of the enigmatic
signifier—for mutual hostility, paranoid fascination, absolute separation
between subject and object, impossible projects of mastery over other-
ness, all these are set up by the relationship put into play by the enigmatic
signifier. For those of us interested in some other kind of sociality, what do
we do? If we can’t get rid of the relationship produced by the enigmatic
signifier, perhaps it can be dis-essentialized, made less central than it is.
What would this involve?
Dean: You’ve just mentioned the importance of collaborative projects, in
which you have of course been involved in the books and essays coau-
thored with Ulysse Dutoit. What has your working together meant to you,
and has the experience of working together been a model of what you just
called “some other kind of sociality”?
Bersani: Very much so. It has been, and continues to be, an important and
somewhat frightening experience. We have worked very closely together on
the paintings, the sculpture, and the films we have chosen to discuss—but
what has this “working together” meant exactly? When I get to the stage of
actually putting together an essay or a chapter from our exchanges, I don’t
really discover that we’ve worked out differences to arrive at a common
position, that some sort of intellectual consensus has been reached, or
that the writing reflects or reveals the dialectical nature of our exchanges.
Rather, I feel a kind of pull away from, even a collapse, of positions I
might have taken, and identified as “mine,” if I were working alone. Our
collaboration has been a sort of beneficent assault on the integrity of our
intellectual egos. I lose myself richly in these collaborations. Specifically,
Ulysse doesn’t need what most of us call “theory”—in particular psycho-
analytic theory—in order to address and be addressed by works of art. For
me, this has led to a certain intellectual instability in my work, which I
don’t regret at all, and which has even been visible in this conversation in
the difficulty I had responding to Kaja about the persistence of masochism
in the more recent work on the correspondence of forms. Perhaps the two
don’t “belong together” at all, but if they collide, that’s okay.
One more word on the “calling forth” I mentioned a couple of min-
utes ago. How might a child be called forth into community in a less
exclusively coupled way? Obviously, the principal responsibility rests with
adults—how we constitute couples. This is future work connected to the
upbringing of children, education, and art; those are three areas where
the mode of calling might be modified in important ways.
The most difficult thing for the couple is to suggest to the child a
call that is more disseminating than narrowing. As it is, the call seems to
come only from one source. But this is just a transposition to the relation
between adult and child of the way in which adults have been taught to
think about the couple. Monogamy is very much involved here. In some
ways the couple must be demonogamized in order for the enigmatic sig-
nifier to be dis-essentialized. Adam Phillips has just written a very inter-
esting book on monogamy which led me to think—and I doubt that he
would be happy with this effect of his work—that violence is inherent in
monogamy.
Foster: How do you get from the extraordinary scene in Genet, recounted
in Homos, where two men fuck on a Paris rooftop, totally indifferent to
the world, all but oblivious to each other—how do you go from this wild
scene, which is radically anticommunitarian, even antirelational, to your
new version of the P.T.A.? I don’t mean to be glib . . .
Bersani: It’s not a question of being glib. Actually, your question interests me
because it takes up, in modified form, a principal criticism of Homos made
by certain gay and lesbian critics. I don’t think you “get from” Genet to
the P.T.A., or—to address gay concerns—to gay marriage or gay adoption
(which of course will make the P.T.A. a universal concern). The issue
is the difference between micropolitics and the kinds of questions I’m
urging people to think about without abandoning struggles for particu-

lar reforms. To me, the interest of the writers that I look at in Homos—
especially Gide and Genet—is not that they are relevant to specific policy
issues that we may face today (for example, what the most effective AIDS
activism might be)—they are not relevant to such issues—but rather, that
they propose what are for the moment necessarily mythic reconfigurations
of identity and of sociality. The problem with queer politics as we now
define it is that, however broad its reach may be, it is still a micropolitics
focused on numerous particular issues which there is no reason to believe
will ever be exhausted if the fundamental types of community and rela-
tionality out of which such issues spring are not themselves questioned
and attacked. And that activity has to be, at least for the moment, an ac-
tivity of the intellectual imagination—one for which the micropoliticians
often have no use or patience but which seems to me no less an activity
and no more of a luxury than our immediate and our, of course, vital
concrete struggles.
Silverman: But in your version of that reimagining, isn’t a certain gay practice
being valorized, in a displaced way? Aren’t you making homosexuality
redemptive? In Homos, cruising provides a way of conceptualizing a re-
demptive communitarianism, and in your present work nonmonogamy
seems to function in a similar way.
Bersani: I would say productive, not redemptive; in my work, redemption
concerns a compensatory relation to a suicidal society. Yes, the homo-
sexual as a category does have a privileged position heuristically, but not
as a social priority.
I am seeking a model of an address that leads not to paranoid fascination
with the mysterious source of the address, but to a disseminating attention
in which the child is not made to feel an imprisoning separation between
himself and the other—a disseminating attention in which a narcissis-
tic discovery of the self replicated outside the self would be possible. In
what sense can a replicative model of relations help to modify the danger-
ous property relations fostered by the generative model of relations—the
couple, the family, and the proprietary implications of those terms?
Dean: I wonder, in seeking a new model of sociality, whether retaining the
term “couple” might lead to problems. The value of your account is that it’s
not really a couple at all, or if it is, it’s one person coupled with something
else that isn’t another person. You pose a nonreciprocal relationship as the
basis for relationality; there’s a kind of depersonalization there. And the
reason that homosexuality seems to work as a model is precisely because
in certain kinds of gay sex (though not only there) there’s a kind of de-
personalization of sexuality, even a dehumanization—which is, of course,
always an object of intense criticism. Isn’t it that relation—not between
persons but between a person and something that is nonhuman—that
you want to build?
Bersani: Very much so. That gets to the connection between the interest Ul-
ysse and I have had in the communication of forms aesthetically and the
interest I have expressed more particularly in the homosexual as a model
not only for the intersubjective but for the relation between the human
and the nonhuman. But I want to focus on this question of privileging the
homosexual.
As you know, my principal objection to queer theory is that it presents
itself as a radical questioning of hegemonic heterosexism, whereas I think
it has been a tame enterprise—tame because it largely consists in mar-
shaling historical reasons for saying the homosexual did not exist before
the middle of the nineteenth century (of course Foucault is very influ-
ential here, and some of this work is very interesting). From this claim
has developed an apparently more radical position—that the heterosexual
was also constituted recently, at the end of the nineteenth century or the
beginning of the twentieth, as a category just as loaded with ideological
and disciplinary implications, indeed with the homosexual needed as its
support. Okay, that’s what has been done, and I’m not against it.
Dean: But are you saying that’s too tame?
Bersani: It’s important, but when all that is said and done, the homosexual is
left as the product of a disciplinary, malevolent society. And it is taken for
granted then that we are politically very radical—which doesn’t follow at
all. You can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often
among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority. So the ques-
tion I wanted to raise in Homos is: Is there some kind of potential radical-
ity, not in homosexuality historically, but in the homosexual as a category?
It troubled me very much that, once the historical case was made about
this evil society constituting us as homosexuals, it turned out that what we
wanted was getting into the very system that has done us all this terrible
harm. So my question became: Is there a model within the homosexual
for thinking a different mode of sociality not based on the suicidal, para-
noid relations that have governed dominant society?
Dean: This gives us the opportunity to make another important distinction,
namely, that in academic discourse in the United States, Foucault’s work
has been used for historicist purposes. In queer theory there is an almost
irresistible imperative to historicize sexuality. Your work is clearly influ-

enced by Foucault in a different direction. How would you characterize
what Foucault means to you?
Bersani: Foucault has been immensely important to me, but I obviously have
mixed feelings about his work—or, more exactly, about his influence.
There has been an absurd and reductive misreading of the first volume
of the History of Sexuality, a reading that claims that “the homosexual”
didn’t exist before the middle of the nineteenth century. I don’t think
Foucault believed that for a single moment. I also think he would have
been shocked by the frankly stupid confusion between the homosexual as
a category of the psyche with elaborately defined characteristics (in large
part, that is a modern invention) and the homosexual as an individual
primarily oriented toward same-sex eroticism.
Foucault interests me mainly for what I take to be his fundamental
project of rethinking relations. This is in particular what the first volume
of the History of Sexuality is aiming toward. Of course, Foucault’s po-
lemic against the primacy of desire in our thought is a polemic against
psychoanalysis, and his move from desire to pleasure remains schematic,
unexplained. As I argue in chapter three of Homos, psychoanalysis, far
from being the enemy of this project, actually complements it—but of
course Foucault didn’t see it that way. I’m very much interested in the role
he gives to gay people in such a project, although, again, I’m bothered by
the somewhat facile evocation in interviews of the happy gay couple and
the idealizations of S / M as a privileged practice in de-genitalizing and
expanding the field of the body’s pleasures. Such idealizing goes against
his truly powerful demonstrations of how all moves encounter points of
resistance, and that the frictions (both physical and psychic) produced by
these thrusts and counterthrusts of “power” must be taken into account
in any enterprise of liberating relationality from the hegemonic model of
domination and enslavement.
Dean: These issues evoke a word we have used only in passing: identity.
Homos seems ambiguous in this respect: it argues both for and against a
certain kind of identity.
Bersani: I think the homosexual might be crucial for constituting a relation-
ality not based on identity. In dominant society today, we see a form of
economics, of global capitalism, that is supernational, but this goes along
with one of the greatest exacerbations of ethnic and nationalist violence
ever seen throughout the world. Economic relations seem to have sur-
passed national limits at the same time that the most suicidal movement
is carried out in the name of ethnic and national particularities. It is a
blind or cover to think that we are beyond the ethnic and national—we
are absolutely stuck in the particular in a horrendous way. This could
endanger our system of global capitalism, given that the latter depends
on conditions that are not riven by daily violence.
These are all matters of identity. And so it becomes extremely
important—for all of us, though it may be more available to homo-
sexuals—to imagine the possibility of nonidentitarian community. That is
the work to be done (it is one reason why Giorgio Agamben interests me).
And this is what the Genet scene on the rooftop and the correspondence
of forms have in common: a peculiar notion of nonidentitarian sameness.
Each man fucking the other replicates himself in the other, and they both
replicate themselves outside, but there’s no identity there. In the same
way, the formal correspondences that Ulysse and I talk about in our three
books are not identical—it’s a kind of sameness that’s not identity. Inac-
curate replication, nonidentarian sameness: it corresponds to homosexual
sex—not necessarily as practiced (very often the difference between the
sexes is reconstituted and played out between two men or two women),
but the homosexual as category, as sameness in which the relation to dif-
ference would be a nonthreatening supplement to sameness. At his or her
best, the homosexual is a failed subject, one that needs its identity to be
cloned, or inaccurately replicated, outside of it. This is the strength, not
the weakness, of homosexuality, for a nihilistic civilization has been built
on the foundation of a (factitious) inviolable subject. This is so important
because I think the only way we can love the other or the external world
is to find ourselves somehow in it. Only then can there be a nonviolent
relation to the external world that doesn’t seek to exterminate difference.
In this sense, “the homosexual” might be a model of this kind of com-
munication of forms.
Dean: This sounds like a version of a question raised in Homos: how desire
gets attached to persons.
Bersani: What we usually mean by desire between persons (something we
understand psychologically, and therefore something quite different from
the scenes in Genet and Gide I discuss in Homos) is by no means the
model for the correspondences that interest us. In fact, the human itself
has no ontological priority here. This “replacing” or “relocating” of the
human perhaps started in the course of our work on Assyrian sculpture
several years ago. During the writing of that book [The Forms of Violence
(1985)], Ulysse made a remark to the effect that the repertory of forms
in the universe is vast but limited; eventually all forms are repeated. In
art, the space of that eventual encounter or “recognition” is condensed
or shrunk. In studying the Assyrian bas-reliefs, we argued not that the
narratives of violence somehow criticized themselves (there is not the
slightest doubt for the Assyrians about the rightness and the glory of that
violence), but rather that the sculptors also draw our attention to families
of forms, thereby suggesting that murderous antagonism toward differ-
ence (one race against another, the Assyrian hunters against animals) can
always be turned away from, perhaps even set aside in, the pleasurable
confirmation of a solidarity in the universe, a solidarity not of identities
but of positionings and configurations in space, one that even ignores the
apparently most intractable identity-difference: between the human and
the nonhuman.
Dean: This issue fascinates me because I think our relation to the nonhuman
is primary and predicates interpersonal relations rather than the reverse. It
prompts me to ask about misreadings of Arts of Impoverishment that claim
you’re treating our relations with art works as an allegory for our relation
to persons—with all the troubling ethical consequences that implies. But
I think you’re doing something much more interesting, by showing how
our relations to art and our relations to other people are simply subsets of
a much broader conception of relationality as such. In other words, inter-
personal relationships don’t determine relationality or sociality.
Bersani: Exactly. And Ulysse has helped me to see these correspondences
not only in the visual arts but also in literature: our discussion of Beck-
ett’s Worstward Ho in Arts of Impoverishment is the analysis of a text so
integrally constituted by inaccurate replications that we read backward
as well as forward to confirm our memory of verbal configurations al-
ready read. I think that I have always been interested in this without real-
izing how directly useful it was and would continue to be (the section
on Baudelaire in The Culture of Redemption “predicts” my own future
work). Ulysse’s formulations, made wholly outside a psychoanalytic frame-
work, led me to a crucial modification of the “self-shattering” notion I
had picked up from Laplanche. Identity-boundaries are violated not only
as a masochistic phenomenon, but also as an effect of reaching toward
one’s own “form” elsewhere. This self-dissolution is also self-accretion; it
is self-incremental. And so, thanks to the nonpsychoanalytic notion of the
correspondence of forms, psychoanalysis is conceptually enriched by the

category of a masochism identical to narcissism. . . . Identity is renounced
in the pleasurable recognition of repetitions, that is, solidarity. The dan-
ger here—and this is addressed in the Rothko Chapel section of Arts of
Impoverishment—is that correspondences might inspire the dream, or the
wish, of a total unity of being, a sameness in which replication would be
accurate and not inaccurate, and which would be equivalent to nothing-
ness. Language, narrative, composition, articulation hold us back from
this, so it can never be a question of simply being, for example, antinarra-
tive, although narrative articulation is also the formal model for a universe
of antagonistic differences.
Silverman: A “total unity” of being would also be completely immobilizing,
not only metaphysically but also subjectively. And mobility is a central
concern of the work you have done with Ulysse Dutoit. Because the two
of you are concerned with the conditions under which we can gravitate to-
ward rather than contain the forms which attract us, under which we can
allow them their exteriority, your notion of the communication of forms
can be seen as a way out of what Lacan calls “formal stagnation.” Formal
stagnation is what happens when we manage to achieve egoic consistency,
when we succeed in sustaining for a long time an incorporative identifi-
cation with a single form. You and Ulysse invite us to let go of the forms
which we have imprisoned within our ego, in order to open ourselves
up to the possibility of a whole new series of relationships, relationships
which are in the first instance aesthetic.
Bersani: A final remark to suggest how different our emphasis on the aes-
thetic is from any so-called formalistic approach to art. Perhaps only an
aesthetic grounded in the communication of forms can relieve the anxiety
of castration. The enigmatic signifier is based on that which is missing,
that which is being withheld from me, that from which I have been cut
off. But in the nonsacrificial aesthetic we trace in the Caravaggio book,
everything connects to and within the wholeness of Being (in an activity
wholly different from the annihilating “unity of being” referred to in our
discussion of Rothko). If we still have “secrets,” they are now secrets not
of interiority but rather of untraceable spatial disseminations; if there is
still “concealment,” it is the concealment of a visibility beyond the paint-
ing to which the painting directs us. Finally—and this is a major part of
our demonstration—the artist himself paints his own connectedness to
his work. The activity of Caravaggio’s body in the work of his painting
is figured in his painting by his occasional presence as a witness. The

artist becomes a relational term within his own work; the latter makes
visible the form of his implication in it. In this art, the communication
of forms takes place, ultimately, as the artist’s painted recognition of
himself.
13
Beyond Redemption:
An Interview with Leo Bersani
with Nicholas Royle
NR: Is it possible? That’s the first question I would like to ask. What is an in-
terview? How might an interview be conceived in the light of your work?
LB: Well, I guess I have to admit it’s a possibility to start with. The main
problem with an interview is always that you feel it can take the direc-
tion of some kind of finalizing or conclusive statement about what you’ve
done, becoming a summary of your work as if the end of a sentence had
been reached. It changes the nature of the work you’ve done, to think of
it as something that has that kind of conclusive, definitive quality. That,
I think, is something that you sometimes feel in interviews and it’s some-
thing I’d certainly like to avoid. On the other hand I think an interview
can also almost entirely neglect what someone has done. But there must
be some way in which you could give the sense of the interview as a mo-
ment in the activity of the person who’s engaged in it and that of course
would be the ideal one.
NR: I suppose I’m intrigued by the idea of the interview and the question
of relationality as it figures in some of your more recent work, the idea
of an interview as something which might not presuppose self-identical
subjects, a different and new way of thinking about the space and form of
the interview.
LB: Well, it’s very difficult, because the very notion of the choice of someone
for an interview implies that you have chosen your particular intellectual
identity to speak with. It would be disingenuous to act as if there were no
Originally appeared in Oxford Literary Review 20. no. 1 (1998): 173–90.

b e y o n d r e d e m p t i o n : a n i n t e r v i e w w i t h l e o b e r s a n i | 188
identity involved here. But that’s what I meant by the fact that if it could
be thought of as part of the activity of a career or life of thinking about
various questions, then it’s not so much of an identity that can be sum-
marized at the interview, but rather something like the Joycean idea of
work in progress.
NR: It would also perhaps be the case that an interview has to fail, wouldn’t
you say? The notion of failure has a crucial place in your work. I wonder
if you would like to say something about failure in this context?
LB: Well, that too is obviously a slippery concept. One could easily say to
somebody who had written a dozen or so books of criticism and who talks
about the necessity of failing: what can that possibly mean, if not some-
thing that’s not very honest? But the notion of failure as I’ve been talking
about it has to be very much situated in relation to another notion, one
that was explored most thoroughly in The Culture of Redemption and Arts
of Impoverishment (The latter written with Ulysse Dutoit). Any identifica-
tion of failure with bad art is ridiculous and that’s obviously not what I
mean. Nor is it a question of failing to make sense. In the case of Arts of
Impoverishment it seemed to us that the artists we talked about—Beckett,
Rothko, and Resnais—were failing with respect to certain traditions and
expectations connected to the medium in which they were working and
that to a certain extent this inhibits a kind of appropriation of the work
which we tend, as a result of a great deal of quite effective cultural train-
ing, to take for granted. That’s what I mean by failure. And it obviously
should be explained successfully in something like an interview. It would
seem to me a cop-out to say: well, I can only fail to explain what I mean
by failure in order to remain faithful to my idea of failure.
NR: Sure. I was thinking in particular of a kind of ethic of failure, as one
perhaps finds in Beckett.
LB: Yes, the Beckett position is obviously the most radical: “I can’t go on—I
must go on.” And you know I think Beckett is an extraordinary example
because in some senses he was an astonishing universal man of letters. He
did everything: criticism, novels, plays, radio, television, film. And yet I
think one has to take very seriously the attempt to instil a kind of paralysis
or immobility, an inhibiting movement, almost unreadability, almost (as
in the Buster Keaton film) unlookability. It’s an attempt to come as close
as possible, in a certain sense, to a kind of non-existence, but that’s a very
difficult accomplishment. I think that when someone like Beckett talks
about failure it really means: what are the modes of discourse which might
be consistent with my sense that I don’t want to write in accordance with
the dominant cultural expectations of what writing should be? It is an

extremely complex form of thinking that requires an extremely complex
form of thinking about the nature of writing—which is hardly consistent
with failure as simply giving up or not doing anything.
NR: Can I keep with the preliminaries for a little while if possible? I recall
when I tried to introduce you to an audience in Finland some years ago
(in 1991), I felt I didn’t know how to describe you, because terms like “so-
cial critic,” “cultural critic,” or “literary intellectual” didn’t and don’t seem
especially appropriate? Is there a noun for you?
LB: Well, I don’t know. I mean I guess yes, I would like to fail in that
respect—especially since I began working at a time when that kind of
identification was assumed to be very easy in the academic world. It was
taken for granted, when I first began to teach, that you identified yourself
and could be introduced very easily—as the nineteenth-century French
literary scholar, the Renaissance scholar, and so on. And as you know
very well, the influence of French thinking, especially in the sixties and
seventies, on titles and identifications and intellectual identities, at least
in the United States, was extremely important because it began to make
those sorts of identifications impossible: people began to be interested
in kinds of work that were no longer easily classifiable in terms of tradi-
tional disciplines. It’s interesting that you ask that, because there’s going
to be a colloquium in Paris in a couple of weeks on theory and subver-
sion and I’ve been preparing a brief talk around this subject. I start by
saying if there is one word I’d eliminate from my vocabulary it would be
“theory” and I end by saying if there is another word I’d eliminate it would
be “subversion.” But none the less, the kind of disidentification process
that I was talking about a couple of moments ago went under the very
inadequate rubric of “theory.” The reason I don’t like calling it theory
(although I realize it’s much more cumbersome to talk about disidentifi-
cation) is that it led to the quite stupid notion that there was no theory in
literature unless you began to talk about it from a certain philosophical
point of view. Whereas there is, I think, no important literary work that
doesn’t theorize about its own activity as it goes along. Unfortunately that
seemed to get forgotten in many American universities, even by many of
the best people actually, who insisted on having theory courses. I’ve always
argued against that because it seems to me that the students then think of
there being a distinct separation between something called literature and
something called theory. I have always felt that one of the most interesting
things that people like Derrida were trying to do was to practice a kind of
writing where that distinction was no longer relevant. So what happened

was interesting, and as usual the institution lags behind us. At Berkeley
I was chair of a department of French literature, a department originally
constituted on very traditional lines of centuries. So you’d hear people
saying that we need a seventeenth-century person, but why did we need
Foucault or Derrida or Lyotard or Laplanche, in other words all these
people that we invited and who came but never “belonged” (in heavy
quotation marks) to a literature department? Institutionally there was no
reason for them to be there, except that there was enough flexibility in
several of the best American universities to allow it to happen. So that you
had a historian, a philosopher, a psychoanalyst spending a semester in
a French literature department—which even at Berkeley several people
in the department were quite unhappy with, but luckily at the time they
didn’t have the power, so it could happen. So if you were at all involved
in any of that it becomes very difficult to know how best to describe what
you are. I think you’ve probably felt the same thing with the kind of itiner-
ary that you’ve followed. It’s true that I began by being presentable in all
senses of the word—respectable and also introduceable—as a specialist
in modern French literature. But for me one of the marvelous things
was a kind of interconnectedness. Alongside French literature, there were
certain things that were happening in my life, such as a very personal
connection with psychoanalysis, which I didn’t have to think of as be-
longing outside of my professional specialty. There wasn’t this kind of
schizophrenic relation between my profession and whatever else I might
be doing, that is, for example, my involvement with psychoanalysis or my
being a gay man—as if all of this was sort of over there and then I had my
unrelated career, of being in modern French literature. Rather there was
some kind of infiltration and contamination, I suppose you might think
of it as a foreign body in one’s professional life—which became, in fact,
not a foreign body in that life but which nourished it in various modes
of interconnectedness. It was not at all that I suddenly began to talk only
about psychoanalysis and homosexuality, and in fact I continue to be very
interested in and continue to write on modern French literature—but in
ways that, I think, do make it difficult to be introduced to someone as a
specialist. That simply wouldn’t cover the ways in which the boundaries
have been blurred.
NR: Another preliminary sort of question I wanted to ask is about the concept
of the œuvre. Do you think of producing or having produced an œuvre?
Is that an appropriate term?
LB: No.
NR: Could you perhaps say a little bit about how one can or should talk
about what it is that you have done or do? You don’t like “œuvre” because
it’s too freighted with. . . .
LB: Well it’s connected to—it has too many connotations of monumental-
ization and completion. The word just seems to me obsolete.
NR: That’s interesting. There’s an interview with Derrida (in Acts of Litera-
ture, ed. Derek Attridge) where he talks about his attachment to the con-
cept of the œuvre. If one rejects this term, I wonder then how one should
talk about a body of writing otherwise.
LB: Why is that? I mean, you don’t require that kind of metalanguage in the
context of other professional or artisanal activities.
NR: Such as . . . ?
LB: Such as being a plumber or a football player or a lawyer. I find it very
irritating that people in the intellectual or academic world think of them-
selves as that different in what they’re doing from what other people are
doing. It’s led to extraordinary pretentiousness on the part of unfortunately
this same group that helped to break down some of those identity barriers
in academic disciplines. You know, there was a time that I remember talk-
ing to one of my colleagues, soon after the AIDS epidemic broke out, who
said only deconstructionists could really understand the immune system.
Which struck me as, you know, an idiocy not to be believed, and that was
someone acknowledged to be a quite brilliant so-called deconstructionist.
But again, what you’re asking is really about how what we do is to be iden-
tified. It is contrary to what interests me, not only because of the obvious
scepticism about identifications in both of our interests in trying to work
to dissolve that kind of security, but also because of the kind of aristocratic
and hierarchical, differential assumptions that seem to me to underlie
that. It implies a quite strikingly nondemocratic view of human work.
NR: Related to that, could I ask you another perhaps banal kind of practical,
everyday question? How do you write?
LB: With a pen. No: what do you mean, how do I write?
NR: Well, if we’re talking about an analogy with plumbers or football players,
could you say a little about how you go about your business, the activity
of writing? Is it easy? Is it painful?
LB: Well, first of all it’s very fragile, so trying to think too much about it is
something I’m not too anxious to do, because I think that you get a kind of
reflex sense that you have to be faithful to the way in which you describe
the way you work. I don’t want that to happen. But generally I find—since
you don’t think only when you’re sitting down and have your computer
in front of you (or, in my case, my notebook)—that certain confronta-
tions, meetings, movements, moments in everyday experience just seem
to make things crystalize. Whether you’re reading—and I mean reading
without a project in mind—or talking to somebody, or just driving, I find
that something begins, and you sort of think, well, it might be interesting
to look at that, I think so-and-so has written something interesting about
that or some friend has said something interesting about that—and then
something begins to shape at that moment—and there’s a long period of
just jotting down thoughts, in a very scattered way, but then reading them
over after two or three months you get to see the possibility of a book or
an essay or something that would be a sustained argument.
NR: As you’re writing your notes you are not sure what the essay or book
might be?
LB: Well, as the notes collect you do begin to get closer to that, I think,
although of course it’s easier if it just happens around a single writer. For
example, my book on Proust involved simply reading Proust material.
Since it was my first book I can still remember the passage in La Prison-
nière where I felt that something is going on here that I can’t quite get by
just reading it and I’d really like to work that out. I mean, writing is work-
ing out something—and in some funny, very naive way it just occurred
to me that that’s the way you write a book, that’s the way you might begin
to write a book, just because in reading you get stuck by something. It
proliferates and goes out from that center. I find the work happens in two
stages mostly. The first stage is really agony in a way. After getting those
notes and feeling I really have something, I usually do an outline of each
chapter, a sort of one-page summary of the argument. And then to begin
to write is extremely painful.
NR: Do you write by hand?
LB: Yes, always by hand. And it’s painful, partly because I tend, in addition
to that shock of recognition that there’s something I want to explore here,
something that may seem to me, for whatever reason, incredible to think
about—I tend to find that moment is accompanied or followed for me by
a sense that I have my first sentence. And then I get this terrible feeling of
fidelity to that sentence—that the book has to be written because I have
that sentence. Now I know that that’s not exactly the case, but I get very
attached to these first sentences. I remember in PhD exams in English
or Comp. Lit., one of the questions that was often asked was: what is the
first sentence of Pride and Prejudice? This stuck in my mind not so much
because of that first sentence (which is a marvelous sentence) but because

I think I already had this kind of—I don’t know—some kind of lightning
thing about first sentences. I just get them. And it can be something that
I’ve had some trouble with. I’m thinking of the essay that Ulysse and I did
on Pasolini’s Saló and Sade (called “Merde alors”). It began with: “The
vagina is a logical defect in nature.” Someone wanted to change it to: “Ac-
cording to Sade, the vagina is a logical defect in nature.” And I refused,
saying it will be quite clear that we’re not saying this as our statement, but
it’s got to stay, as the first shock.
NR: “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.”
LB: Yes, yes.
NR: Is this [the opening sentence of “Is the Rectum a Grave?”] a good ex-
ample of what you’re talking about—as if in a sense everything issues from
that first sentence?
LB: Yes, in that essay what I say about various kinds of terror of gay sex
and the attitude toward pornography—and, near the end of the essay,
the celebration of an ascetic jouissance—is all connected, I suppose, to
that aversion. I feel the first sentence is extremely important in almost
getting a high, or at least I hope that it gives a kind of high—it gives
me a high and I hope it gives the reader a high. But at the same time
I don’t really want the essay to be entirely faithful to its first sentence,
at least not in a very literal way. Although in some respects the talk I
did yesterday does work in that way: “Psychoanalytically speaking, mo-
nogamy is cognitively inconceivable and morally indefensible.” I think
the talk does more or less follow that, as divided into two parts: the first
sentence is almost an outline of what’s going to come. But then what’s
marvelous about writing, I think, is that—when you’re accomplishing
something, when it’s going along smoothly (I think maybe tennis players
feel this during a very good long rally)—a great deal of energy is being
used but at the same time it’s as if it’s really one of these rare moments
in existence where there is this extraordinary ease of a kind of steady,
expansive going out. It’s just happening. It’s coming. And the sexual
connotation of “coming” here is only partly relevant—because it’s not
so much an explosive pouring out, it’s really just a kind of—it’s funny,
it’s the maximum of activity with the maximum of peace, and it’s the
maximum of inward concentration with also the maximum of giving, of
moving out, expansiveness.
NR: So it’s something that is in accord with what you say, in various contexts,
about radical passivity?
LB: In a way, yes, a passivity that’s not deadening, where actually the distinc-
tion between activity and passivity doesn’t seem relevant any more. I think
that’s very important. One of the stultifying things about the way people
talk about sex is the distinction between activity and passivity. In one of
the psychoanalytic sections in the book on Assyrian sculpture that Ulysse
and I wrote [The Forms of Violence]—and I can’t remember now the con-
text or why we talked about it—but we were trying to say how wrong it is
to talk about male sexuality (and I don’t mean just gay male sexuality but
I mean genital male sexuality in either a gay or a straight context) as “ac-
tive,” as if it could be only active. In a sense the male orgasm is impossible
without passivity. It’s a very nice and extremely pleasurable example of a
moment when there is a kind of—at its highest intensity—a breakdown
of that distinction. But I think it exists in other things as well. I think that
the writing process can be an example of that.
NR: There’s a letter in which E. M. Forster describes the experience of writ-
ing A Passage to India as “voluntary surrender to infection.” It’s volitional,
in some sense, but the power isn’t yours, or is only yours by not being
yours.
LB: Yes, it’s almost like a kind of open secret that you keep about writing.
You wouldn’t write if you weren’t interested in what we vaguely call ideas,
but at the same time I don’t think people would be interested in your
ideas if there weren’t something else going on in your writing—which
is a little more difficult to get at—even though people are very hesitant
to talk about it, partly because they don’t know how to talk about it and
partly because they may be slightly afraid of it and somewhat afraid of
themselves in it as well. It’s very rare to feel that you have what seems
like a total adequation to language. We’re usually not aware of the gap
between the body that we’re happy to live in and this language which
is not a creation of that body but on which we depend and which we
use instrumentally so easily. Of course people have talked about that fa-
mous “otherness of language”—but I think it becomes very physical and
felt when you write, because it’s after all something that you’re trying to
express but at the same time there’s something foreign in the operation
and that’s very particular to writing and I think that’s different from the
other kinds of professions that one might engage in. I mean the language
is to writing what the football is to football but for the football player
the football itself is not something that’s troubling, that is, this difference
between the object and the person using it is not troubling. Whereas, in
writing, you want to be identical to that foreign object from which you’re
different. And I guess what happens in certain moments is that language

comes to realize a certain rhythm in yourself—and it really is a rhythm
where I can’t distinguish between mental and physical. For example at the
beginning of Chapter 3 (‘The Gay Daddy’) in Homos, I’ve made almost
palpable in the writing a rhythm of movement towards Foucault (towards
the things he was talking about—gay love and gay sex) and movement
away (from his desexualizing of the gay threat). It’s a fluctuation, a kind
of respiration almost, that’s fast, slow, changes its pace and its spacing,
and it actually embraced, actually coerced language into embracing its
undulations. And it comes out in that particular passage as a humor or
irony or distancing, to use a series of recognizable critical terms which,
at the same time, don’t exactly describe the specific coincidence between
the rhythms of body and that which is foreign to the body. Maybe that’s
the peace and expansiveness I was talking about before. The inherent
foreignness of language momentarily becomes simply like the clothing of
your most intimate rhythms and that’s an extraordinary correspondence.
It might even be the sort of biological foundation of my interest in what
Ulysse and I have been calling the correspondence of forms. It’s a corre-
spondence where you realize that there is a mode in which your moving
through space coincides with the circulation of something entirely indif-
ferent to you, which is language, and that there was a junction, something
happened, there was an intersection which is extremely peaceful because
you’re out of yourself at the same time.
NR: A coitus?
LB: Perhaps.
NR: I wonder if we could link this to what Malcolm Bowie was talking about
yesterday. The kind of attention he was giving to your writing seemed to
me to represent something new in terms of the ways in which I’ve seen
your work being written about. In his distinctive deployment of quite clas-
sical terms like “style” and “irony,” and in his discussion of what he names
that “perverse epigrammatic intensity” which he takes to be characteristic
of “the later Bersani,” his paper did seem to be engaging in fascinating
ways with these difficulties of how one might talk about writing, your
writing in particular.
LB: Yes, I think what he was talking about was in different terms the thing
that I’ve just been trying to describe. I think that in distinguishing be-
tween some of the first things that I’ve written and some of the more
recent things it was as if he was saying that that kind of coincidence
of rhythms—impersonal and linguistic rhythms and my most intimate
rhythms—was happening more, recently, than it had before, so I was very

interested in that. It’s difficult to talk about but I like very much his al-
most irritation at those phrases that might qualify that, as if I were a little
afraid of that happening all the time. In fact I find more and more that I
cut out phrases like “it might be said that” or “so to speak” or “precisely,”
all these words that don’t mean anything, but that are ways in which lan-
guage treacherously provides us with phrases with which we remind our-
selves and others that we are really not talking, we’re really only using
the language. So that interested me very much, as a kind of warning. It’s
funny—when you watch people at a lecture listening to you: I’ve always
felt, for example, that on the few occasions I’ve spoken when Malcolm’s
been there, that’s he’s hearing the kind of thing that I was talking about.
I feel that there are certain people who are not just hearing the so-called
ideas but they’re also actually participating themselves, when you do it
successfully, in that rhythmic concordance between a system of intellec-
tual and physical respiration and the system of language.
NR: This may be simply to do with my own sense of rapport with your work,
but I am often struck by a sense of comic energy, a feeling that there is
something immensely funny happening somewhere.
LB: When I was working on the beginning of the Foucault chapter in Ho-
mos with the man who translated it into French we were both not exactly
hilarious but we found it very funny. But it’s not always or ever simply
funny. Thinking about the kind of coincidence that I was talking about,
that one reaches very rarely, that anybody reaches very rarely, I think (ex-
cept the greatest writers, say, Shakespeare or Dante, who seem to write
almost all the time that way)—but where I feel I come closest to it, for
example in Homos, is in two very different modes: at the beginning of
that Foucault chapter and at the very end of it, where there’s that little
lyrical thing—which really has nothing to do with any of the ideas in the
book—about two men fucking: this isn’t humorous in the way that the
beginning of the chapter perhaps is but still, I just felt totally at ease in
writing that in some way, and I don’t think it was for psychological rea-
sons. I just think the language hits something there. There’s also a passage
that I’m very attached to in the essay on Saló and Sade, a passage on the
aesthetic about which I remember just feeling sort of frightened in writ-
ing it, because I really felt that there was a kind of intimacy in me about
what this art was like, that I had never even understood until the moment
I was writing this passage, and it was very, very strange, and that wasn’t
funny either.
One of my most intimate rhythms has been important to me in teach-

ing, at least when I have been most successful, and it’s very annoying to
some students, as if I’m being frivolous or not taking myself seriously. It
doesn’t bother me to be dismissive of my own ideas when I teach. I mean,
I want to be as rigorous as possible, thinking about these ideas, but at the
same time I would hate very much to be identified as, in all seriousness,
a “such-and-such.” You know in the United States there are department
meetings at the university where people say “we need a Marxist critic”
and “we need a psychoanalytic critic,” and the number of times people
have said to me “you’ve been a psychoanalytic critic, haven’t you?” I hate
that. (Reviewers, incidentally, have consistently said that Caravaggio’s Se-
crets is a psychoanalytic study, which it is not.) I’ve had troubling classes
when students have tried to read things psychoanalytically and I’ve sort
of trashed psychoanalysis. In various ways now I’m moving away from
psychoanalysis, but even when I was most involved in it, it seemed to be
very uninteresting to sort of be really faithful to it in a way, and there is
something comical about that, I mean comical about being willing to
leave lots of points at rest as you go along. I think the beginning of “The
Gay Daddy” chapter is that. Here’s this statement from Foucault about
why these two guys are happy. In a sense what’s interesting about it is that
it’s against everything I’ve ever thought—but that’s why I like it. I mean I
like it and I don’t like it. There’s always something funny in sort of walking
along with someone—and it’s slightly affectionate and slightly mocking
at the same time. That strikes me as a very healthy combination, in order
to avoid what I think is a very bad form of passion, when passion—either
in sexual relations or even intellectual relations—comes to be obsession,
and a lot of political passions are obsessions, just as a lot of romantic pas-
sions are obsessions. It may seem as if you lose yourself in that kind of pas-
sion but in fact it’s extremely self-affirming in a bad sense, an appropriative
and tyrannical form of passion. Whereas this other thing, of being sort
of laughing a little at that with which you’re walking along, whether it’s
Foucault or your own ideas, seems to me to be very good. And that may
be the source of what you’re thinking of.
NR: In what you’ve just said I can’t help hearing a sort of etymological playing
out of “parody,” of song, of something beside itself, walking beside oneself
perhaps. Just recently when I was rereading “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” I
was very struck by how much it seems to be an essay about parody. Perhaps
I could recall a couple of brief quotations from the essay? The first is:
“Parody is an erotic turn-off, and all gay men know this.” The second is the
sentence that runs: “The ultimate logic of MacKinnon’s and Dworkin’s

critique of pornography—and, however parodistic this may sound, I really
don’t mean it as a parody of their views—would be the criminalization of
sex itself until it has been reinvented.” You would like to take a distance
from the notion of parody, even while engaging or at least invoking it?
LB: Yes, I feel somewhat inconclusive about that. I’m a little suspicious of
the term “parody.” I know that when people use that word they often are
willing to say that there’s a certain affection included in the parodistic
movement or there can be, but a parody is a kind of mocking if somewhat
affectionate imitation of something, right?
NR: There is something affirmative about it, you mean?
LB: Well, there can be. One of the things I argue against in Homos is the
extraordinary importance that at some point Judith Butler had given to the
notion of the subversive effect on dominant cultural models of parodies
of those models. Here parody would not be affectionate, because it really
is trying to undermine and subvert those forms. Butler, if I’m reading
her correctly, was thinking of parody as having a possible, real, politically
subversive function, because it exposes things in the model that are then
weaker as a result of the parodistic confrontation. But the model can also
be unaffected, or even strengthened, by the “affirmative” side of parody, by
a complicity between it and its object. In “Is the Rectum a Grave?” I was
talking about two different kinds of parody. First, there is the gay leather
thing which has been defended as a parody of a certain type of machismo
masculinity. (As David Miller has brilliantly said, the body you wouldn’t
dare fuck with—the serious straight machismo—becomes, in the gay ver-
sion, the body you may indeed be allowed to fuck.) My argument was that
there is also a great deal of complicity in the parody, and that it really is
paying tribute to what is being parodied. The second kind is the parody
of women in gay campy conversation, which certainly includes complic-
ity (as in the machismo leather scene with machismo maleness), but is
also heavy mockery, and really quite nasty toward women. I mean I think
it’s part of the misogyny in gay life and that kind of deliberate effeminate
campiness is connected to the—what I’ve always found disgusting—near
idolatry of those actresses who represented a bitchy and destructive femi-
ninity, like Bette Davis in some of her movies, or, even worse, the worship
of Judy Garland—you know, the woman as a total sort of extraordinary,
talented being and at the same time a total drugged wreck. What bet-
ter way to murder a woman than to take Judy Garland as a heroine? So
anyway, just as a conclusion: I’m not sure I would want to use the word
“parody” for the kind of comic “walking alongside” that we’ve been talk-
ing about.
NR: Yes, sure. Can we go back for a moment (if we ever left it) to psycho-
analysis? You see yourself as moving away from psychoanalysis, and that
seems to have to do with what you talk about as different ways of being
in the world.
LB: Ulysse and I have been discussing presences of the subject in the world
that are not effects of interpretation, projection or identification. The art
we’ve studied suggests, in different ways, that we are already in the world
(even before we appeared in it . . . ), there are always relations, and not
simply because we interpret and project and introject the world, and it’s
that distinction between ways of being in the world that I’m now inter-
ested in talking about.
NR: So it’s the idea of what you were talking about (in “Against Monogamy”),
the idea of a self that is not identificatory?
LB: Yes, a self that is not simply a self of interpretation. But of course I’m
not really “leaving” psychoanalysis, as you can see from my talk yesterday,
especially in my comments on Civilization and Its Discontents. It’s one of
the books I just came back to: I reread it and discovered that there was a
whole other thing going on—other than what I had previously seen. I had
never paid that much attention to it but in Civilization and Its Discontents
Freud is saying something like: “You know I’m not really saying much that
is new, but then, finally, here is a psychoanalytic idea.” I didn’t talk about
that in The Freudian Body, except in passing, and now (with “Against Mo-
nogamy”) it’s the center of what I am saying about Civilization and Its Dis-
contents. Civilization and Its Discontents is funny in the way that there is
all this somewhat banal respectability in much of the early chapters of the
main text and then two or three of these footnotes have these wild things
about sniffing and how we had to give up doing the only thing we really
wanted to do, which was go round on all fours sniffing women. The “ra-
tional” part of the text is more faithful to an ideal or model in traditional
philosophy, a certain model of seriousness, one that goes under the rubric
of truth and knowledge; seriousness vehicles the notion that philosophy
gives us truth and / or knowledge. Freud in his most interesting moments
undercuts any security about what knowledge or truth might mean. This
is also the case with the Caravaggio book, where we say that Caravaggio
is an early figure in the history of the suspicion, fatal to philosophy, that
truth cannot be the object of knowledge, that there is no such thing as

truth. I think truth is the basis of the kind of seriousness that I’m interested
in helping to do away with.
NR: Can I ask you about teaching, about how you teach and how you feel
about teaching? Perhaps this could be linked up to something you re-
ferred to in the discussion yesterday, about the idea of teaching in such as
a way as “not to say anything absolutely.”
LB: Yes, I’m more and more interested in that (it is, I think, a phrase of Rob-
ert Walser) because people of course ask more and more: What are the
practical modes of this? What can one do, what’s open to us in changing
modes of relationality? These are the questions the Caravaggio book and
Homos and even The Culture of Redemption seem to invite. I mean, if we
don’t have a redemptive culture what do we or might we have?
NR: Beyond redemption, you mean?
LB: Yes. It’s very difficult. I understand why people ask that question, but at
the same time you can’t do everything at once. I mean, you do have to go
through a kind of speculative, rather non-immediately-politically-viable
stage of reflection and a lot of it may turn out to be finally just disposable,
but that’s all right: it’s like writing first drafts, you throw away some of it.
Of course very specific things need to be done politically, and we should
engage in those struggles. In gay life we are far from having all the rights
we should have. For instance, I think gay marriage as an ideal for the gay
community is completely uninteresting, but I certainly would fight for
the right for gay men and women to have it. So there are all these things
that are fairly obvious and necessary struggles, but beyond or in addition
to that, I’d say, I’m energized by attempting to imagine new modes of
relating and relationality. And some of these new modes are ways that
exist anyway, but which we seem trained, culturally, not to notice, for ex-
ample in a kind of connection to the other and to the outside that I was
describing in relation to the process of writing, or in the ways in which I
can “walk alongside” Foucault now, or in the “formal correspondences”
Ulysse and I trace in the visual art we’ve written about. And as teachers we
have a rare opportunity to experiment with some of the shifts in modes of
connecting that I’m interested in. That is what teaching is: it’s a sustained
time and space where you do nothing but see how a group of people
are going to connect. It’s really extraordinary in that way. In teaching, a
certain type of group-work can be done, which might slowly disseminate
into a fairly significant part of society. It would be a matter of how modes
of connectedness subtly change within a society. Literature also does
this. Literature does finally have an effect on the way in which people
instinctively and intuitively relate and connect. And I think teaching can
also do that. It can train us, among other things, in a kind of impersonal
intimacy, an intellectual and nonpermanent friendship. Pedagogy and
friendship are modes of extensibility less glamorous than public sex (a
current queer favorite) but perhaps more worthy of exploration. Foucault’s
interest in friendship in his final work, Derrida’s work on the politics of
friendship—I mean, why talk about that now if not because there’s a sense
of these new relations? To redefine friendship would be a political move.
A political move, for example, in opposition to a certain notion of the
most important relation as being the (usually married) couple. That’s my
interest in the “Monogamy” essay, for example.
NR: It makes me think of a phrase that you and Ulysse Dutoit use in the
Caravaggio book. You talk about his paintings as constituting a sort of
ontological laboratory. I’m now thinking that perhaps that is what your
work suggests an interview should also be. Linked to that, finally, I’m also
wondering if, all along—in relation to everything you have been saying
about rhythm and respiration and connectedness—we haven’t also been
talking about music. Could you say anything about this? What is your
relation to music?
LB: It’s a very poor relation. I have this sort of fantasy plan that—except I
keep thinking of other things to do. I mean I struggled when I was a kid
with studying piano for ten or twelve years. I resisted it a great deal as a
lot of kids do, but now I’m more and more interested in music. I’m very
ignorant about it, but I’ve always thought I wanted to develop it. It inter-
ests me more than anything else now, but in the depths of ignorance. It
may not be what I will do, either in terms of the composers that I’m go-
ing to mention or in terms of even whether I’m going to do it, but I feel
that much of what I’ve been trying to do I would understand better if I
could understand what’s going on in certain pieces of Schubert and late
Beethoven. And that’s all I can say about that.
NR: Thank you very much.
Index
abstinence, premarital, 122, 123–24 anal sex: attitudes toward passive role in sex,
“Advice to Doctors on Psychoanalytic Treat- 18–19; Freud on, 123; homophobia and
ment” (Freud), 156 jouissance of, 133; potential for multiple
aesthetic subject, 83–167; in Almodóvar’s orgasms of, 18; self-annihilation associ-
All About My Mother, 80; as mode of ated with, 29–30
relational being, 142; psychoanalysis and, And the Band Played On (Shilts), 7n
139–53; self-loss in, 69–70 Arcadia (Florida), 5, 16–17, 18
Affect Theory, 67–68 Aristophanes, 55, 56–57, 117–18
Agamben, Giorgio, 183 art: the aesthetic and, 70, 185; as affirmation
aggression: comes to include everything, 99; of solidarity in the universe, 100; of Al-
in demand for sexual relation, 51; Freud modóvar, 70–82; as anticommunitarian,
on narcissistic enjoyment in, 64, 65, 127; 34; defining gay art, 31; diagrams universal
Freud on sex and, 64, 126–32, 134, 136; in relationality, 142; failure in, 188; as form-
internalizing authority, 98; jouissance as giving and form-revealing, 104; Godard
inseparable from, 150; jouissance of, 136; in reformulation of the aesthetic, 167;
oceanic feeling associated with, 126, 127, homoeroticism found in, 34, 42; human
132; psychoanalysis on human destruc- subject’s capacity for exceeding its own
tiveness, 63–64, 65, 79; renunciation of subjectivity in, 139; impotent aesthetics,
aggressiveness multiplies its force, 173. 171; is there a gay art?, 31–35; as model
See also violence for new relational modes, x; negativity
AIDS: displacement in discourse about, 27; in, 34; and politics, 35; Proustian, 160–61;
media coverage of, 5–9; monogamy as psychoanalysis on work of, 140; as site of
consequence of, 25, 85; as pretense for being as emergence into connectedness,
oppression of gays, 6–8; promiscuity 104, 118. See also aesthetic subject
associated with, 3, 5, 16, 17, 27; public Arts of Impoverishment (Bersani and Dutoit):
and political responses to, 4–9; Reagan on Beckett’s Westward Ho, 184; on calling
administration response to, 4–5, 6–7; of subject into human community, 176;
research, 4, 27 on correspondence of forms, 175; on ego-
A la recherche du temps perdu (Proust), 58 dissolving self-extensions into the world,
All About Eve (film), 71, 78, 79, 80 34; on failure in art, 188; on impotent
All About My Mother (Almodóvar), 71–82 aesthetics, 171; on nonerotic sensual
Allouch, Jean, 66, 109 exchanges, 131n; on relations between hu-
Almodóvar, Pedro, 70–82; All About My man and nonhuman, 87, 184; on Rothko
Mother, 71–82; The Flower of My Secret, Chapel, 185
74; Labyrinth of Passion, 81; The Law of ascesis, 30, 48, 58–59, 61, 69, 193
Desire, 75–76; Matador, 75; Pepi, Luci, Assumption of the Virgin (El Greco), 165–67
Bom, and Other Girls on the Heap, 73, 81; Assyrian sculpture, 142, 183–84, 194
repetition in work of, 75, 76, 80; Women
on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 82; Balzac to Beckett / Center and Circumference
on women talking, 73–74, 82 in French Fiction (Bersani), 171
Altman, Dennis, 12 Barthes, Roland, 32
i n d e x | 204
Bataille, Georges, 24, 25, 25n25, 109 127, 199; on oceanic feeling, 99, 124;
bathhouses: closing of, 5; hierarchy and com- oceanic textuality of, 128; paradoxes in,
petition at, 12, 29; ideal cruising in, 60 98, 128–29; on self-containment, 173; on
Baudelaire, Charles, 171, 184 sexual repression, 125–32
Baudelaire and Freud (Bersani), ix, 28, 171 “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern
Beckett, Samuel, 34, 103–4, 176, 184, 188–89 Nervous Illness” (Freud), 121–25, 130
being on top: Foucault on, 59; MacKinnon community: art as anticommunitarian, 34;
and Dworkin on significance of, 21; as in bathhouses, 29; calling forth into,
never question of just physical position, 176, 179; cruising for conceptualizing
23; power represented by, 19; struggle for redemptive communitarianism, 180; fam-
power as consequence of, 25 ily conflicts repeated in, 96; Genet’s view
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 100, of, 33, 179; identity as communitarian,
127, 131, 159 37, 86–87; in pastoral view of sex, 22, 34;
bisexuality, 89–92, 126 redefining, 38, 43
blacks: collaborating with their oppres- Company (Beckett), 103–4, 176
sors, 15; gay men compared with, 9–10; confidentiality, 6
violence of inequality, 20 conscience, 52, 88, 97–98, 128–29
Blood Wedding (Lorca), 78 control, loss of, 24
Boffey, Philip M., 5n2 conversation, sociable, 46–47
Bollas, Christopher, 94, 97, 162 Cooper, Dennis, 34
Boswell, John, 18 coquetry, 47, 60
Bowen, Otis R., 6, 7 countertransference, 156
Bowie, Malcolm, 195 couple, reconstituting the, 178–80
butch-fem lesbian couples, 12 cruising, 57–62; as an ascesis, 69; for concep-
Butler, Judith, 32, 38, 40, 90, 196 tualizing redemptive communitarianism,
180; ideal, 60; phallocentrism of, 28; as
Califia, Pat, 22 promiscuous, 57; seen as relationally in-
camp, 14, 198 novative, 59; as sexual sociality, 57, 61; as
Caravaggio, 35, 135, 142, 175, 177, 185–86, training ground in intimacy, 60–62, 69
199–200 Culture of Redemption (Bersani), 171, 173,
Caravaggio’s Secrets (Bersani and Dutoit), 35, 177, 184, 188, 200
131n, 135, 172, 177, 196, 199–200, 201 cut of being, 147, 150
Cartesian dualism, 154, 155–56, 157, 160, 162
castration, 54, 175–76, 185 Davis, Bette, 72, 198
catharsis argument, 21 Dean, Tim, 110–11
Chartreuse de Parme, La (Stendhal), 50 death: death drive, 65, 67, 68, 79, 100, 131,
child abuse, 22, 27, 29, 99, 132 137, 159, 176; sex associated with, 61–62
childhood sexuality, 22, 29 Deleuze, Gilles, 111n14, 161
Christian right, 37, 123 depth psychology, 139, 156
Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud): on Derrida, Jacques, 189–90, 191, 201
aggression and the sexual, 64, 126–32, 134, desire: as construction, 76; defensive func-
136; on antagonism between civilization of, 79; essentialism in schemes
tion and sexuality, 50, 93; arrives at idea of, 39; Foucault on power and, 157;
worthy of psychoanalysis, 98, 199; on Foucault’s distinction between pleasure
bisexuality, 90, 126; on civilization and and, 135, 182; founding, 151; how it gets
individual unhappiness, 120; “everything attached to persons, 183–84; Lacan on
past is preserved,” 99, 131, 149; footnotes object and cause of, 159; Lacan’s excesses
of, 125, 126; on guilt, 68; on internal- of, 100–101; Lacan’s theory of, 110–11; as
ization of authority, 96; on loving thy lack, 110–19, 135, 138; power to see it ev-
neighbor as thyself, 63; on narcissistic erywhere, 144; psychoanalysis on origins
enjoyment in destruction, 65, 79; as of gay male, 53–55, 88, 89; psychoanaly-
not speaking psychoanalytically, 97, 121, sis’ tendentious accounts of, 105
i n d e x | 205
difference: Aristophanes’ myth and, 55, 118; family values, 85, 86; in media coverage
art as attack on cult of, 34; communitar- of AIDS, 8–9; as psychoanalytic haven to
ian identities privilege, 87; as founda- which we regress, 101; resignifying, 41
tional relational structure, 103; homoness fantasy, 148–49, 151
and, 43–44; metaphysical, 60–61; mine father, the: in internalization of authority,
against yours, 37; negotiating, 150; as 98–99, 129; in Oedipus Complex, 88, 89,
never totally nonnegotiable, 60; non- 90, 94–95; in Oedipus Rex, 95–96; in psy-
threatening, 33, 55, 183; Proust celebrates, choanalytic account of male homosexual
58; in Proustian love, 157; psychoanalysis desire, 54
on subject’s incapacity to negotiate, 106; Fear of a Queer Planet (Warner), 41, 42
sexual, 43, 55–56, 96–97 female sexuality: gay male sexual sexuality
dissolution of the self. See self-dissolution compared with, 17–18, 61; Greek revul-
diversity, 26, 26n29, 28, 29, 41, 42, 103 sion toward, 39; leather queens and, 13;
dualism, Cartesian, 154, 155–56, 157, 160, 162 men’s view of, 19–20; passivity associated
Dutoit, Ulysse: on betrayal of historical with, 12, 90
subject, 172; Caravaggio’s Secrets, 35, feminism: gay men’s relationship to, 41–42;
131n, 135, 172, 177, 196, 199–200, 201; col- lesbian, 41, 42; on penetration and
laboration with Bersani, 63, 167, 178–79; power, 19
on communication of forms, 100, 181; Flower of My Secret, The (Almodóvar), 74
on correspondence of forms, 195; The formal stagnation, 185
Forms of Violence, 184, 194; on inaccurate forms: communication of, 43–44, 100, 175,
replications, 146, 156; “Merde alors,” 193, 181, 183, 185; correspondence of, 175, 176,
196; mobility as central concern of, 185; 179, 183, 185, 195; repertory of, 184
and productive masochism, 174; on reper- Forms of Violence, The (Bersani and Dutoit),
tory of forms, 184; on sameness that is not 184, 194
identity, 183; on self that is not simply Forster, E. M., 194
a self of interpretation, 199; speculative Foucault, Michel: on Aristophanes’ myth,
experiments in relational innovation of, 117; on ascesis, 58–59, 61; Bersani
134–35. See also Arts of Impoverishment influenced by, 182; corporeal stripping
Dworkin, Andrea, 19–22 enterprise of, 136–37; desire and pleasure
Dyer, Richard, 13 distinguished by, 135, 182; on diversity, 26;
on “ethic of the self,” 155–56; and Freud,
Ecole lacanienne, 66, 109 133–38; on friendship, 201; on Greek atti-
Ego and the Id, The (Freud), 52, 88, 105 tude toward passive role in sex, 18–19, 39;
ego ideal, 52–53, 56, 105 “Hermeneutics of the Subject” course,
ego psychology, 67, 132 155; on homosexuality as invented in
enigmatic signifier: in defeat of the self, 110; nineteenth century, 181, 182; on learning
and Lacanian unconscious, 176–77; in to be gay, 50; on men’s view of female
monogamy, 92; other ways of imagining sexuality, 19, 21; on new relational modes,
sociality, 178–79; seduction by, 107–8; ix–x, 50, 59, 69, 102, 134–35, 137–38, 161;
sends us messages we can’t “metabolize,” on new ways of being together, 86, 102–3;
57; in Un amour de Swann, 58 on nonascetic subject of knowledge,
Eribon, Didier, 66, 134 62; on power, 23, 137–38; on psycho-
ethics: ecological, 62; Foucault on “ethic of analysis and power, 157; queer theory
the self,” 155–56 influenced by, 38, 66, 181–82; on revised
“Ethics of Psychoanalysis” seminar, 63, 64, 141 imagination of bodily pleasure, 22; on
extensibility of the subject, 87, 104, 118, 160, sadomasochism, 19, 27–28, 59, 182; on
175, 177, 201 self-knowledge, 154–57; on sexual es-
sences, 39, 40, 136; on sexual inequalities
failure, 171–73, 188–89 as displaced social inequalities, 28; on
family: in Almodóvar’s All About My Mother, sexuality as historical construct, 135–36;
76; community repeats conflicts of, 96; on sexual pleasure as loss of self, 109; on
i n d e x | 206
Foucault, Michel (continued) gay-macho style, 12–15, 22, 198

souci de soi (care of the self), 135, 154, 155, gay men: AIDS as pretense for oppres-
158, 161; on spirituality, 154, 158, 161; on sion of, 6–8; Aristophanes’ myth on
subject-object dualism in psychoanalysis, origins of homosexual desire, 55, 56–57,
156; unwillingness to engage psycho- 117–18; blacks compared with, 9–10;
analysis, 133; on what disturbs people camp, 14, 198; cultural construction
about homosexuality, 26–27, 38, 58–59, of, 39; defensiveness about gay life,
102, 133–34 25–26; and feminism, 41–42; Foucault
Freud, Sigmund: “Advice to Doctors on on what disturbs people about, 26–27,
Psychoanalytic Treatment,” 156; Beyond 38, 58–59, 133–34; identification with
the Pleasure Principle, 100, 127, 131, 159; disenfranchised, 41; as killers, 17, 27; in
on civilization and individual unhappi- mainstream of American life, 9–10; in
ness, 120; “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality media coverage of AIDS, 5–9; misogyny
and Modern Nervous Illness,” 121–25, in, 42, 198; mother in origin of male
130; depsychologizing of psychoanalysis homosexuality, 71–72; as “obsessed”
in, 139; on disorganization of the self with sex, 30; and political radicalism,
in sexual pleasure, 24; on dualisms, 10–12, 181; promiscuity attributed to, 3,
100; The Ego and the Id, 52, 88, 105; on 5, 16, 17, 27; psychoanalysis on origins
external world, 99, 105, 132, 140–41, 152; of gay desire, 53–55, 88, 89; violence
and Foucault, 133–38; Group Psychology toward, 28–29
and the Analysis of the Ego, 49, 51–52, Gay Shame, 68–69
53, 55, 105; on harm from suppression of gender: expressions of inequality, 20; social
sexual life, 121–25; “Instincts and Their construction of, 15. See also machismo
Vicissitudes,” 56, 105, 140; on jouissance Genet, Jean: betrayal by, 44; Funeral Rites,
as inseparable from aggression, 150; on 33, 103; mythic reconfiguration proposed
love as phenomenon of memory, 162; by, 43, 180; as outlaw, 35; view of sociality
on love of neighbor, 63; on monogamy, of, 33, 43, 103, 179, 183
87–101; “Mourning and Melancholia,” Gide, André, 43, 85, 180, 183
52; on narcissistic pleasure in aggression, Godard, Jean-Luc, 142, 163–67
64, 65, 127; on nostalgia for narcissism in Grande Beaune, La (Michon), 142–53
heterosexual men, 105–6, 118; “On Nar- Greek view of passive role in sex, 18–19, 39, 40
cissism: An Introduction,” 52, 105, 159; on Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
organic repression, 125; on sense of guilt, (Freud), 49, 51–52, 53, 55, 105
68; on sex and aggression, 64, 126–32, 134; Guattari, Félix, 111n14
on sexuality as constructed, 136; on sexual guilt, 68, 98, 129, 130
pleasure as by-product, 109; on sociality
and homosexuality, 49–50, 51–57; “Some Hagopian, Robert, 3
Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Hall, Stuart, 8
Paranoia and Homosexuality,” 49, 51, 52, Halperin, David, 39, 66, 116n
53; “The Taboo of Virginity,” 93; Three happiness, sex and, 120–32
Essays on the History of Sexuality, 24, 93, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 140
109, 122, 136, 159, 174. See also Civiliza- “Hermeneutics of the Subject” course, 155
tion and Its Discontents; psychoanalysis History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 18, 26,
Freudian Body, The (Bersani), ix, 24, 109, 159, 58, 135, 154, 157, 182
171–72, 174, 199 Hite, Shere, 23n22
Freud’s Papers on Technique (Lacan), 106 holocaust, the, 7
friendship, 201 homoeroticism, 34, 42, 118
Funeral Rites (Genet), 33, 103 homoness, 34, 43–44, 70
Future for Astyanax, A (Bersani), 171 homophobia: attributed to psychoanalysis,
66; death drive concept and, 67, 68; gay
Garland, Judy, 198 self-erasure realizes aim of, 39; lesbian
gay and lesbian cultural studies, 31–33, 37 identity and, 38, 40; misogyny inherent
i n d e x | 207
in, 39; psychoanalysis in understanding “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (Bersani), 41, 61,
of, 133, 134 109, 133, 193, 197–98
Homos (Bersani): ambivalence about IV drug users, 6, 8
psychoanalysis in, 134; on cruising, 180;
on de-gaying of gayness, 37–38, 39, 40, Jouhandeau, Marcel, 69
42, 43; on desire for sameness, 69; on jouissance: of aggression, 136; always risks
escaping transgressive relationality, 103; corrupting pleasure, 138; beyond, 65; as
“The Gay Daddy” chapter, 195, 196, defeat of power, 109; as enemy of plea-
197; on gay identity and images of the sure, 159–60; Freud on, 24; homophobia
body, 33; on homosexuality’s potential and, 133; inherent in violence, 65, 68,
for radicalism, 181; on how desire gets 79; as inseparable from aggression, 150;
attached to persons, 183–84; on identity, interdiction as source of, 56; Lacan on,
182; on mythic reconfiguration versus 64, 109; lived, 61; as mode of ascesis,
micropolitics, 43, 179–80; on parody, 30, 193; and new relational modes, 134;
198; on pastoral versions of sexuality, ix; object-destroying, 142; of otherness, 61;
on psychoanalysis and Foucault, 182; on and pleasure of sociability, 48
queer theory on sexual identity, 65–66;
on rethinking the relational in terms of “Kant avec Sade” (Lacan), 141
design, 177–78; on sadomasochism, 59; Kelly, Ellsworth, 142
two modes in, 196 Klein, Melanie, 79, 108, 140
homosexuality: as beneficent crisis of self- Kramer, Larry, 8
hood, 171; for constituting relationality
not based on identity, 180–83; crisis in Labyrinth of Passion (Almodóvar), 81
defining gay culture, 31; de-gaying of gay Lacan, Jacques: American gay and lesbian
and lesbian community, 36–44; as dis- studies and reflections on jouissance
rupted, 41; Freud on sociality and, 49–50, of, 109; on castration, 54; on defensive
51–57; gayness distinguished from, 11–12, function of desire, 79; on demand for
11n8; homosexuals as failed subjects, 43, sexual relation, 51; depsychologizing of
183; identification with disenfranchised, psychoanalysis in, 139; on desire of / for,
41; as invented in nineteenth century, 32, 58; on ego psychology, 132; “Ethics of
181, 182; is there a gay art?, 31–35; learn- Psychoanalysis” seminar of, 63, 64, 141;
ing to be gay, 50; and political radicalism, excesses of desire in, 100–101; on formal
10–12, 181; premarital abstinence seen stagnation, 185; on Freud on love of
as leading to, 122, 123–24; queerness as our neighbor, 63; Freud’s Papers on
resistance to normativity, 38, 66; as same- Technique, 106; on fundamental fantasy,
ness, 183. See also gay men; homophobia; 144; on jouissance as enemy of pleasure,
lesbians; queer theory 160; on jouissance as inseparable from
Hudson, Rock, 10, 27 aggression, 64, 150; “Kant avec Sade,”
141; on misidentification, 152; on object
identity, sexual. See sexual identity and cause of desire, 159; on objet petit a,
identity-politics, 37, 38, 86 141; on sex and destructiveness, 64; on
“Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (Freud), subject’s relation to the world, 106–7, 141;
56, 105, 140 theory of desire of, 110–11; “there is no
intercourse: feminist rejection of, 20–21; sexual relation,” 79; on the unconscious,
Freud on nongenital, 123; penetration, 138, 177
19, 23, 23n22, 39, 40; without thrusting, Lane, Chris, 32
23n22. See also anal sex; being on top Laplanche, Jean: on death drive and sexual-
Intimacies (Bersani and Phillips), 161, 162 ity, 100, 137, 176; on destructiveness and
intimacy: cruising as training ground in, sexuality, 64; on enigmatic signifier, 57,
60–62, 69; Genet on, 33; impersonal, 58, 92, 107–8, 110, 176–77, 178–79; on
162, 201 jouissance as inseparable from aggression,
Islam, 18 150; Life and Death in Psychoanalysis,
i n d e x | 208
Laplanche, Jean (continued) 25, 85; cruising contrasted with, 60;

159; on normative bias in psychoanalysis, demonogamizing to de-essentialize
66; on Oedipus complex and homosexu- the enigmatic signifier, 179; new lease
ality, 88; on self-shattering, 64, 109, 159, on life for, 85–86; psychoanalysis on,
172, 174, 184; on the unconscious, 107, 87–101; queer theorists on nonmo-
176–77 nogamous gay couple, 59; violence as
Law of Desire, The (Almodóvar), 75–76 inherent in, 179
leather queens, 13 Monogamy (Phillips), 93–94, 179
Leonardo da Vinci, 35, 53, 57 mother, the: in Laplanche’s theory of enig-
lesbians: Aristophanes’ myth on origins of matic signifier, 107–8; male homosexual-
homosexual desire, 117; Butler on what ity associated with, 71–72; in Oedipus
they have in common, 38, 40; cultural Complex, 88, 89, 90; in psychoanalytic
construction of, 39; lesbian feminism, account of male homosexual desire,
41, 42; psychoanalysis on origins of gay 53–55
desire, 88, 89; sadomasochism, 12, 22 “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud), 52
Lewis, Anthony, 10 music, 201
Life and Death in Psychoanalysis
(Laplanche), 159 Narayan, Opendra, 3, 5, 17
Lorca, Federico García, 78 narcissism: and aggression, 64, 65, 127; in
breaking down of self-congratulatory ego,
machismo: in Almodóvar’s All About My 34; category of masochism identical to,
Mother, 73; gay-macho style, 12–15, 22, 185; discovery of self replicated outside
198; in pastoral view of sex, 29 self, 180; and ego ideal, 52, 105; in Genet’s
MacKinnon, Catharine A., 3, 19–22, 28 view of community, 33; heterosexual
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 35, 164 men’s nostalgia for, 106, 118; impersonal,
Marcus, Greil, 34 34, 48, 118; of impersonal intimacy, 162;
marriage: in “civilized” sexual morality, 122; limitless, 100; love as blind, 160; and
psychoanalysis on origins of, 93; as regres- rediscovering the self outside the self, 175;
sion to infantile securities, 94; same-sex, specular, 118; women associated with,
85, 134, 179, 200 105, 106
masochism: category identical to narcissism, News of the World (periodical), 5
185; as not viable alternative to mastery, New St. Marks Baths (New York City), 5
110; productive, 174–76; as psychical
strategy, 24–25; sexuality as tautology for, object-cathexis, 53, 88
109; sociality compared with, 48. See also object-choice, 49, 52, 55, 92
sadomasochism (S & M) object relations, 108
masturbation, 122, 123 objet petit a, 141
Matador (Almodóvar), 75 Observer (newspaper), 16
Meese, Edwin, 7 oceanic feeling, 99, 100, 124, 126, 127, 132
“Merde alors” (Bersani and Dutoit), 193, 196 Oedipal complex, 33, 54, 88–92, 94, 95–96, 101
Michon, Pierre, 142–53 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 95–96
Miller, D. A., 32, 198 oeuvre, 190–91
Miller, Jacques-Alain, 159 “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (Freud),
Millet, Catherine, 69–70 52, 105, 159
Misanthrope, Le (Molière), 50 oral sex: in Almodóvar’s All About My
misidentification, 152 Mother, 73, 77; Freud on, 123
misogyny: displaced, 28; feminist response to,
29; gay men identify with, 42, 198; in ho- parody, 197–98
mophobia, 39; homophobia displaces, 133 Pascal, Blaise, 3, 65
Molière, 50 Passion (Godard), 163–67
monogamy, 85–101; in “civilized” sexual passivity: female sexuality associated with,
morality, 122; as consequence of AIDS, 12, 90; in Greek attitude toward sexuality,
i n d e x | 209
18–19; inferiority associated with, 59; Proust, Marcel: on art, 160–61; Godard’s
powerless contrasted with, 24; radical, similitudes compared with metaphors
193–94 of, 166; and Laplanche’s enigmatic
past, the, 147 signifier, 108; La Prisonnière, 157, 192; on
pastoral versions of sexuality, ix, 22, 28, 29, self-knowledge, 156, 157–60; Sodome et
34, 50, 110 Gomorrhe, 157–59, 160; on spectacle of
penetration, 19, 23, 23n22, 39, 40 people speaking together, 74; Un Amour
penis: in Almodóvar’s All About My Mother, de Swann, 57–58; work positions us as
73, 77–78, 81; centrality in gay male de- aesthetic subjects, 142
sire, 70; phallocentrism, 24, 28; sanitized psychoanalysis: and the aesthetic sub-
and sublimated into the phallus, 27, 70 ject, 139–53; as all about sex, 121, 131;
penis envy, 23 Bersani’s connection with, 190, 197, 199;
Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Other Girls on the clinical practice of, 132, 161; depsycholo-
Heap (Almodóvar), 73, 81 gizing, 139; as depth psychology, 139,
phallocentrism, 24, 28 156; on everything past as preserved, 99,
Phillips, Adam, 93–94, 161, 162, 179 131, 149; on external world, 99, 105, 132,
Plato, 55, 56–57, 111–19, 142, 162 140–41, 152; as failing to elaborate radical
pluralism, sexual, 22, 25–26, 28, 30 position of nonsubjective interiority,
Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the 149–50; and failure, 172; Foucault and,
Media (Watney), 4 133, 156, 157, 182; on homosexuality
politics: accounts of origins of sexual prefer- as “perversion,” 50, 53; on human de-
ences and, 40; art and, 35; gay men and structiveness, 63–64, 65, 79, 126–32; on
radical, 10–12, 181; identity-politics, 37, human subject’s capacity for exceeding
38, 86; mythic reconfiguration contrasted its own subjectivity, 139; intersubjectivity
with micropolitics, 43, 179–80; queer, 43; as drama of property relations for, 108; as
sex and, 12, 14 leading to dissolution of self, 161–62; on
polysexuality: aversion to sex as consistent monogamy, 87–101; on new relational
with, 4; childhood, 22; middle-class con- modes, 134, 137; as normative, 40, 66,
sciousness and racism consistent with, 11 134; on origins of gay male desire,
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 66 53–55, 88, 89; on overdetermined mind,
pornography, 19–22 100; paradox in, 98, 128; queer theo-
power: failed subjectivity versus mastery and rists reject, 50, 66–67, 137; relational
containment, 172–73; of fantasy to re- mechanisms studied in, 106, 140, 142;
make world, 151; Foucault on, 23, 137–38; relational modeled on libidinal in, 110;
Foucault on psychoanalysis and, 157; on specificity of origin and movement
jouissance as defeat of, 109; and knowl- in same-sex desire, 40; tendentious
edge, 154; in Proust, 157; sadomasochism accounts of desire of, 105; for under-
and idolatry of, 59; and sex, 19–25, 29 standing sexual identity, ix–x; what is
powerlessness, 23, 24, 29 distinctive in, 97–101; on work of art,
pride, 38, 68 140. See also Freud, Sigmund; Lacan,
Prisonnière, La (Proust), 157, 192 Jacques; Laplanche, Jean
promiscuity: AIDS associated with, 3, 5, 16, public sex, 51, 59, 201
17, 27; of childhood curiosity, 93–94;
in cruising, 57; as freeing gays from queer theory: on accounts of origins of sex-
assimilation, 44; versus gay commitment ual preference, 40; as anti-identitarian,
to monogamy, 85; monogamy’s immoral 31; Foucault’s influence on, 38, 66,
rejection of, 101; Oedipal desires as both 181–82; on gay art, 31; new relational
monogamous and promiscuous, 96; modes proposed by, 59; on psychoanaly-
reduction of the subject and, 69–70 sis, 50, 66–67, 137; redefines itself as new
prostitutes: in Almodóvar’s All About My identitarianism, 70; sexual essences
Mother, 73, 77; nineteenth-century repre- rejected by, 38, 39; shame as interest in,
sentations of female, 17–18 68; as too tame, 40, 181
i n d e x | 210
Reagan, Ronald, 4–5, 6–7 homosexuality; intercourse; monogamy;

redemptive reinvention of sex, 22, 26 polysexuality; promiscuity; sexual identity
Reich, Wilhelm, 130 sexual identity: in Almodóvar’s All About
repression, sexual, 125–32 My Mother, 71–82; de-gaying of gay and
Republican Party, 37 lesbian community, 36–44; is there a
Resnais, Alain, 34, 142, 188 gay art?, 31–35; oversimplified versions
Rolland, Romain, 126, 127 of, ix; psychoanalysis for understanding,
Romans, ancient, 18 ix–x; queer theory on, 65–66; the sexual
Rothko, Mark, 34, 104, 142, 185, 188 subject, 1–82
Rothko Chapel, 104, 185 Sexual Life of Catherine M., The (Millet),
Rubin, Gayle, 22, 25–26 69–70
sexual pluralism, 22, 25–26, 28, 30
sadomasochism (S & M): Foucault on, 19, Shadow of the Object, The (Bollas), 162
27–28, 59, 182; lesbian, 12, 22; in Michon’s shame: in Affect Theory, 67–68; in queer
La Grande Beaune, 143–44, 146, 151; theory, 68; transforming into pride,
sadism collapses into masochism, 100 68–69
salon, 48, 50 Shilts, Randy, 7n
sameness: Aristophanes’ myth and, 55, 118; Silverman, Kaja, 111
difference privileged over, 87; self- Simmel, Georg: on sociability, 45–49, 50, 60,
dissolution initiated by desire for, 69; 69; on society and the individual, 120–21
sexual, 96; suppressing the otherness in Simpson, Robert, 7
which it’s hidden from my consciousness, 60 Minutes (television program), 7, 7n
140; that is not identity, 183 smell, sense of, 125, 126
same-sex marriage, 85, 134, 179, 200 Smith, SueEllen, 16–17
Scenario for Passion (Godard), 163, 164, 165 sociability, 45–57; in Almodóvar’s All About
Sedgwick, Eve, 40, 67, 68, 70 My Mother, 74, 82; as ascetic, 48; cruising
Seidman, Steven, 41 as sexual, 57, 61; Freud on homosexual-
self-dissolution: art manifests, 34; desire for ity and, 49–50, 51–57; in Genet, 33;
sameness and seductive, 69; Laplanche metaphysical, 61–62; pleasure of, 46–48;
on self-shattering, 64, 109, 159, 172, 174, problematizing, 86; pure, abstract play of
184; psychoanalysis leading to, 161–62; form as characteristic of, 46; reconfigur-
in sexual pleasure, 24; suicidal versus ing, 43, 172, 176, 178, 180; rhythms of,
nonsuicidal, 172–75 46–47; Simmel on, 45–49, 50, 60, 69;
self-knowledge, 154–67; Foucault on, 154–57; sociality and sexuality, 102–19
Proust on, 156, 157–60 “Sociology of Sociability, The” (Simmel),
sex: active / passive distinction in conceptual- 45, 120
izing, 194; and aggression, 64, 126–32, Sodome et Gomorrhe (Proust), 157–59, 160
134, 136; aversion to, 3–4, 193; bisexuality, “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy,
89–92, 126; death associated with, 61–62, Paranoia and Homosexuality” (Freud),
100, 159, 176; displacement in discourse 49, 51, 52, 53
about, 27–28; as fantasized ecstasy of Sophocles, 95–96
oneness, 150; Freud and Foucault on, Stendhal, 50
133–38; and happiness, 120–32; identified Strauss, Frédéric, 73, 82
with love and community, 21, 22, 34; as Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams), 71, 72,
modality of the aesthetic, 70; pastoral 73, 77, 78–79, 80
versions of, ix, 22, 28, 29, 34, 50, 110; subjectivity: calling into community, 176,
pluralism, 22, 25–26, 28, 30; and politics, 179; extensibility of the subject, 87, 104,
12, 14; and power, 19–25, 29; public, 51, 118, 160, 175, 177, 201; failed, 43, 171,
59, 201; redemptive reinvention of, 22, 26; 173, 183; fiction of unified subject, 43;
and reproduction, 122; sexual difference, human subject’s capacity for exceeding
43, 55–56, 96–97; sociality and sexual- its own, 139; as inherently relational, x;
ity, 102–19. See also female sexuality; psychoanalysis for understanding, ix–x;
i n d e x | 211
the sexual subject, 1–82; that is not effect Wallach, Richard, 5, 17

of interpretation, 199. See also aesthetic Walser, Robert, 200
subject; self-dissolution; self-knowledge Warner, Michael: on intimate relations
Sun (newspaper), 5–6 among men in heterosexual ideologies,
surrender, sexual, 70 32; on “queer” as preferred to “gay,” 42;
Symposium (Plato), 55, 56–57, 111–19, 142 on queerness as resistance to regimes of
syphilis, 18 the normal, 38; on sexuality as primary
category for queer studies, 42; Tomkins as
“Taboo of Virginity, The” (Freud), 93 influence on, 67, 68
teaching, Bersani’s idea of, 200–201 Watney, Simon: on displacement, 28; on gay
theory, 189–90 men as killers, 17; on making the rectum
Three Essays on the History of Sexuality a grave, 29; on response to AIDS, 4, 5, 6,
(Freud), 24, 93, 109, 122, 136, 159, 174 8, 9, 11, 16; on sexual pluralism, 22, 26
Tomkins, Silvan, 67–68 Weeks, Jeffrey: on gay-macho style, 12–13; on
top, being on. See being on top gay men and male heterosexual identity,
transference, 156 15; on homosexuality versus gayness, 11,
Turner, J. M. W., 104 11n8; on pluralism of gay life, 25; on radi-
cally revised imagination of body’s capac-
Un Amour de Swann (Proust), 57–58 ity for pleasure, 22; on sexual inequalities
unconscious, the: as dimension of virtuality, as displaced social inequalities, 28
147–48; Foucault and, 133; Lacan on, Westward Ho (Beckett), 184
138, 177; Laplanche on, 107, 176–77; in Wilde, Oscar, 32
Michon’s La Grande Beaune, 145; as not Williams, Tennessee, 81
of same order as what might know it, Wittig, Monique, 38
149; in psychoanalysis, 140; in rethinking women: in Almodóvar’s All About My
relationality, 138 Mother, 81–82; gay male camp as parody
universalism, 37 of, 14, 198; narcissism associated with, 105,
106; oppression of, 29; sexual ignorance
violence: in Almodóvar’s work, 75; art and, of nineteenth-century, 122, 123; violence
34–35; fiction of unified subject as toward, 28. See also female sexuality;
source of, 43; inflicted on living bodies, feminism; lesbians; misogyny
147; jouissance inherent in, 65, 68; in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
monogamy, 179; in pornography, 19–22; (Almodóvar), 82
toward gay men and lesbians, 28–29. See writing, Bersani’s method of and approach
also sadomasochism (S & M) to, 191–96

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Is the Rectum a Grave?

and Other Essays

Is the Rectum a Grave?

the university of chicago press • chicago and london

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04352-4 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-04352-5 (cloth)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicaion Data

o The paper used in this publication meets the

Part 1 | The Sexual Subject

Part 2 | Toward an Aesthetic Subject

Part 3 | Two Interviews

Foucault’s summoning us to rethink the relational as a political and moral

Is the Rectum a Grave?

To the memory of Robert Hagopian

These people have sex twenty to thirty times a night. . . . A man

I will leave you wondering, with me, why it is that when a

Le moi est haïssable. . . .

Originally published in October 43 (Winter 1987): 197–222.

I am, however, interested in my rather irresponsibly announced findings of

commission,2 and the general tendency to think of AIDS as an epidemic of

reverend himself, candidly added, “Sometimes I think he would like to shoot

T he peculiar exclusion of the principal sufferers in the AIDS crisis from

Let’s return for a moment to the disturbed harmonies of Arcadia, Florida,

pleasures. This is first of all a question of positioning. If the penetration neces-

tional process of maturation.24 From this Freudian perspective, we might

F ar from apologizing for their promiscuity as a failure to maintain a loving

this idea by arguing for a “theoretical as well as a sexual pluralism.”28 Watney

32. See Weeks, p. 44.

could be thought of as informing even the most oppressive demonstrations

man’s rectum that he demolishes his own perhaps otherwise uncontrollable

Is There a Gay Art?

Unpublished lecture given in London, 1996.

modern period, communities in which we see rudimentary forms of what

identification of homosexuality with sameness by insisting on the radical

thought of as a triumph of the powerful right wing of the Republican Party,

paradoxical relation to the notion of a gay or homosexual identity—at once

in such remarks is understandable. The elaborating of erotic preferences into

it has also initiated an anti-essentializing inquiry into the nature of desire.

people’s rights to serve whatever worthy or unworthy cause inspires them,

but of positionings and configurations in space, a solidarity that ignores even

Sociability and Cruising

Sociability is a form of relationality uncontaminated by desire.

6. Ibid., p 136. 10. Ibid., p 128.

psychoanalytic account that would trace the pleasure of sociability either

13. Ibid., p 136.

What Freud means by social feeling is more general than sociability. It

the unavoidable aggressiveness accompanying what Lacan has analyzed as

behind, remain uninhibited. There must be a specificity to the desire itself

The psychoanalytically defined homosexual, on the other hand, in spite

also acknowledge the even rarer opportunity in heterosexual love for a

C ruising is sexual sociability. The danger associated with cruising is not

a party where Swann had expected her, Odette is metamorphosed from an

Foucault understood as radically different from merely “being homosexual.”

An understandable but unfortunate queer response to this condemnation

Aggression, Gay Shame, and

Nothing is more absurd, Freud asserts in Civilization and Its Discontents

human destructiveness resistant to any therapeutic endeavors whatsoever.

of the “extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment” that (Freud

I t is doubtful that queer theory will be helpful in this enterprise. The

two 2003 American colloquia, on gay shame, at the University of Michigan,

Almodóvar, will give us a very agreeable lesson on the dephallicizing of the

E arly in Pedro Almodóvar’s 2000 film, All About My Mother, Esteban